Dependent data broadcasting for unordered queries in a multiple channel mobile environment

Data broadcasting is a promising technique to improve the bandwidth utilization and conserve the power consumption in a mobile computing environment. In many applications, the data items broadcast are dependent upon one another. However, most prior studies on broadcasting dependent data are restricted to a single broadcast channel environment which imposes an impractical limitation. In view of this, we explore in this paper the problem of broadcasting dependent date in multiple broadcast channels. By analyzing the model of dependent data broadcasting, we derive several theoretical properties for the average access time in a multiple channel environment. In light of the theoretical results, we develop a genetic algorithm to generate broadcast programs. Our experimental results show that the theoretical results derived are able to guide the search of the genetic algorithm very effectively, thus leading to solution broadcast programs of very high quality.