Efficient scheduling algorithms for on-demand wireless data broadcast

On-demand wireless data broadcast is an efficient way to disseminate data to a large number of mobile users. In many applications, such as stock quotes and flight schedules, users may have to download multiple data items per request. However the multi-item request scheduling has not yet been thoroughly investigated for on-demand wireless data broadcasts. In this paper, we step-up on investigating this problem from viewpoint of theory and simulation. We develop a two-stage scheduling scheme to arrange the requested data items with the objective of minimizing the average access latency. The first stage is to select the data items to be broadcast in the next time period and the second stage is to schedule the broadcasting order for the data items selected in the first stage. We develop algorithms for the two stages respectively and analyze them both theoretically and practically. We also compare the proposed algorithms with other well known scheduling methods through simulation. The theoretical findings and simulation results reveal that significantly better access latency can be obtained by using our scheduling scheme rather than its competitors.