An Index Allocation Method for Data Access over Multiple Wireless Broadcast Channels

With the advent of mobile technology, broadcasting data over one or more wireless channels has been considered an excellent way to efficiently disseminate data to a large number of mobile users. In such a wireless broadcast environment, the minimization of both access and tuning times is an important problem because mobile devices usually have limited battery power. In this paper, we propose an index allocation method for data access over multiple channels. Our method first derives external index information from the scheduled data, and then allocates it over the channels, which have shorter broadcast cycles and hotter data items. Moreover, local exponential indexes with different parameters are built within each channel for local data search. Experiments are performed to compare the effectiveness of our approach with an existing approach. The results show that our method outperforms the existing method by 30% in average access time and by 16% in average tuning time when the data skew is high and data item size is much bigger than index node size.