Efficient Channel Allocation Tree Generation for Data Broadcasting in a Mobile Computing Environment

The research issue of broadcasting has attracted a considerable amount of attention in a mobile computing system. By utilizing broadcast channels, a server continuously and repeatedly broadcasts data to mobile users. These broadcast channels are also known as “broadcast disks” from which mobile users can retrieve data. Using broadcasting, mobile users can obtain the data of interest efficiently and only need to wait for the required data to present on the broadcast channel. The issue of designing proper data allocation in the broadcast disks is to reduce the average expected delay of all data items. We explore in this paper the problem of generating hierarchical broadcast programs with the data access frequencies and the number of broadcast disks in a broadcast disk array given. Specifically, we first transform the problem of generating hierarchical broadcast programs into the one of constructing a channel allocation tree with variant-fanout. By exploiting the feature of tree generation with variant-fanout, we develop a heuristic algorithm VFK to minimize the expected delay of data items in the broadcast program. In order to evaluate the solution quality obtained by algorithm VFK and compare its resulting broadcast program with the optimal one, we devise an algorithm OPT based on a guided search to obtain the optimal solution. Performance of these algorithms is comparatively analyzed. Sensitivity analysis on several parameters, including the number of data items and the number of broadcast disks, is conducted. It is shown by our simulation results that by exploiting the feature of variant-fanout in constructing the channel allocation tree, the solution obtained by algorithm VFK is of very high quality and is in fact very close to the optimal one resulted by algorithm OPT. Moreover, algorithm VFK is of very good scalability which is important for algorithm VFK to be of practical use to generate hierarchical broadcast programs dynamically in a mobile computing environment.