A new broadcasting technique for an adaptive hybrid data delivery in wireless mobile network environment

Pull-based data delivery is unsuitable for wireless mobile computing due to the limited bandwidth of wireless networks. To address this problem, dissemination based (or push-based) techniques can be used to allow the mobile units to share the broadcast data. This approach is very effective for very popular data. But broadcasting unpopular data repeatedly would waste the precious bandwidth severely. Therefore, the most likely mode of retrieval in wireless mobile environments is going to be mixed, i.e., the popular data objects are broadcast and other (unpopular) objects are provided on demand. To make the mixed approach work seamlessly, we need to measure which data objects are popular. However, the measurement in a wireless broadcasting environment is difficult since in passive broadcasting, users do not communicate with the server to acknowledge the usefulness of the broadcast. In this paper, we investigate an adaptive hybrid approach, in which the popularity of the data objects is determined interactively and dynamically. This information allows us to broadcast only popular data, whereas less popular data is transmitted on-demand (unicast) to conserve network bandwidth. Also, we use a novel technique to determine the amount of bandwidth to be assigned for both broadcast and unicast, in an integrated way. Our simulation results indicate that our technique outperforms recent techniques by a significant margin.