Reducing Latency through Efficient Channel Allocation Methods for Multiversion Data Dissemination in Mobile Computing Environment

This paper focuses on channel allocation methods for multiversion data dissemination in mobile computing systems in which maximizing data currency (minimizing staleness) and minimizing the mean response time are of equal importance as providing consistent data items to mobile transactions. We propose broadcast marshalling method that clusters data to be broadcast, depending on their access frequencies, to reduce mean response time of the mobile clients. We consider two basic multiversion data organizations, namely vertical and horizontal data organizations and it uses an efficient mobile data compression technique, with minimal impact on the client, to efficiently use the low bandwidth of mobile communication systems and to reduce the mean access delay for data items and minimize the response times of the requests from the mobile clients. The broadcast and on-demand channels have different access performance under different system parameters and that a mobile cell should use a combination of both to obtain optimal access time for a given workload and system parameters. We study the data access efficiency of three channel configurations: i) all channels are used as on-demand channels (exclusive on-demand), ii) all channels are used for broadcast (exclusive broadcast) and iii) some channels are on-demand channels and some are broadcast channels (hybrid). Simulations on obtaining the optimal channel allocation, with two different Multiversion data organizations combined with compression scheme, were conducted and the result shows that the method significantly improves the system performance.