Exploiting skewed access and energy-efficient algorithm to improve the performance of wireless data broadcasting

As wireless networks become an integral component of the current communication infrastructure, energy efficiency is a crucial design consideration because of the limited battery life of mobile terminals. Data broadcast is an effective data dissemination method in mobile environments. The current air indexing schemes for data broadcast focused on energy efficiency (reducing tuning time) only, and current broadcast scheduling schemes reduce access latency through nonflat data broadcast to improve only responsiveness. Few studies have addressed energy efficiency and responsiveness issues concurrently. This study proposes a fast data access scheme that concurrently supports the energy saving protocol, which constructs broadcast channels according to the access frequency of each type of message to improve energy efficiency in mobile devices. The windmill scheduling algorithm that is presented in this paper was used to organize all types of messages in the broadcast channel in the most symmetrical distribution, to reduce tuning and access time. The performance of the proposed mechanism was analyzed, and the efficiency improvement over existing methods was demonstrated numerically. Results indicate that the proposed mechanism is capable of improving both tuning and access time because of the presence of skewness in the access distribution among disseminated messages.