Data Broadcasting in a Mobile Environment

Abstract

The advances in mobile devices and wireless communication techniques have enabled anywhere, anytime data access. Data being accessed can be categorized into three classes: private data, shared data, and public data. Private and shared data are usually accessed through on-demandbased approaches, while public data can be most effectively disseminated using broadcasting. In the mobile computing environment, the characteristics of mobile devices and limitations of wireless communication technology pose challenges on broadcasting strategy as well as data-retrieval method designs. Major research issues include indexing scheme, broadcasting over single and parallel channels, data distribution and replication strategy, conflict resolution, and data retrieval method. In this chapter, we investigate solutions proposed for these issues. High performance and low power consumption are the two main objectives of the proposed schemes. Comprehensive simulation results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of each solution and compare different approaches.