Optimizing Index Allocation for Sequential Data Broadcasting in Wireless Mobile Computing

Energy saving is one of the most important issues in wireless mobile computing. Among others, one viable approach to achieving energy saving is to use an indexed data organization to broadcast data over wireless channels to mobile units. Using indexed broadcasting, mobile units can be guided to the data of interest efficiently and only need to be actively listening to the broadcasting channel when the relevant information is present. In this paper, we explore the issue of indexing data with skewed access for sequential broadcasting in wireless mobile computing. We first propose methods to build index trees based on access frequencies of data records. To minimize the average cost of index probes, we consider two cases: one for fixed index fanouts and the other for variant index fanouts, and devise algorithms to construct index trees for both cases. We show that the cost of index probes can be minimized not only by employing an imbalanced index tree that is designed in accordance with data access skew, but also by exploiting variant fanouts for index nodes. Note that, even for the same index tree, different broadcasting orders of data records will lead to different average data access times. To address this issue, we develop an algorithm to determine the optimal order for sequential data broadcasting to minimize the average data access time. Performance evaluation on the algorithms proposed is conducted. Examples and remarks are given to illustrate our results.