An Efficient Method to Estimate the Broadcast Cycle Length in the Data Broadcast in Wireless Mobile Environments

Data broadcast is an efficient method to disseminate information in wireless mobile environments to a large number of mobile clients. Data are transmitted on the channel periodically; clients listen to the channel where they download what they are interested. The response time is one of the most important metrics for the performance evaluation in data broadcast. In this paper we discuss the effect of the broadcast cycle length (BCL) on the response time, present both theoretical result and practical method to estimate the BCL. Broadcast scheduling algorithms using this BCL can achieve a near optimal response time.