MULS: A General Framework of Providing Multilevel Service Quality in Sequential Data Broadcasting

In recent years, data broadcasting becomes a promising technique to design a mobile information system with power conservation, high scalability and high bandwidth utilization. In many applications, the query issued by a mobile client corresponds to multiple items which should be accessed in a sequential order. In this paper, we study the scheduling approach in such a sequential data broadcasting environment. Explicitly, we propose a general framework referred to as MULS (standing for MUlti-Level Service) for an information system. There are two primary stages in MULS: on-line scheduling and optimization procedure. In the first stage, we propose an On- Line Scheduling algorithm (denoted by OLS) to allocate the data items into multiple channels. As for the second stage, we devise an optimization procedure SCI, standing for Sampling with Controlled Iteration, to enhance the quality of broadcast programs generated by algorithm OLS. Procedure SCI is able to strike a compromise between effectiveness and efficiency by tuning the control parameters. According to the experimental results, we show that algorithm OLS with procedure SCI outperforms the approaches in prior works prominently in both effectiveness (i.e., the average access time of mobile users) and efficiency (i.e., the complexity of the scheduling algorithm). Therefore, by cooperating algorithm OLS with procedure SCI, the proposed MULS framework is able to generate broadcast programs with flexibility of providing different service qualities under different requirements of effectiveness and efficiency: in the dynamic environment in which the access patterns and information contents change rapidly, the parameters used in SCI will perform online scheduling with satisfactory service quality. As for the static environment in which the query profile and the database are updated infrequently, larger values of parameters are helpful to generate an optimized broadcast program, indicating the advantageous feature of MULS.