Semantic data access in an asymmetric mobile environment

The mobile environment is inherently asymmetric. To utilize the downstream bandwidth effectively, hot data items should be disseminated over the broadcast channel to the mobile clients. To equip clients with the ability to identify the nature of the broadcast and to determine the answerability of their queries, semantic descriptions are associated with information units in the broadcast, organized into data chunks. Based on the nature of data items received over the broadcast, clients can initiate appropriate requests to make up for the remaining items over the back channels in an on-demand basis. We investigation into several semantic-based algorithms to organize data chunks and compare their performance with traditional data item-based organization in the asymmetric environment.