A Parameterized Flexible Indexing Scheme for Data Broadcast in Wireless Mobile Environments

Data broadcast is an efficient method of disseminating information in a wireless environment to a large number of clients with mobile devices. It requires the clients to be actively listening to the broadcast channels for their interested information, which increases the battery consumption. However, up to now the battery of the mobile devices is still a bottleneck, which limits the mobile applications to a small scale. Air indexing is an efficient technique that can reduce the energy consumption, thus the effective battery life is extended. But the additional index information increases the broadcast cycle, which leads to longer access latency. In this paper we propose a parameterized flexible indexing scheme (PFInd), which can be used to tune the trade-off between access efficiency and energy conservation based on client's specific requirements. Experimental results show that this method achieves better performance and flexibility than some state-of-the-art indexes.