TMBT: An Efficient Index Allocation Method for Multi-Channel Data Broadcast

Broadcast is an attractive data dissemination means over multiple wireless channels due to its scalability. Since mobile clients have limited battery power and broadcast data have different popularities, how these data are fast accessed becomes an important issue. Our solution consists of first allocating data among channels near-optimally, and adopting flat broadcast per channel. Then, a binary tree indexing structure is built for each channel and nodes of all index trees are multiplexed onto a well-known physical channel, named as TMBT (time-multiplexed multiple binary trees) Our method organizes data and index into a popularity hierarchy which results in a skewed transmission of data and index. Skewed transmission has been shown to reduce the average access time effectively. Simulation results show that the reduction of access time is on average about 48% over previous work with little tuning time overhead.