A NEW Method to Design Broadcast Schedules in a Wireless Communication Environment

Abstract

Wireless data broadcasting is a promising way of disseminating information to a massive number of clients in an asymmetric communication environment where client-to-server communication is infeasible. An important issue to be addressed in data broadcasting is how to organize the data in the broadcast in such a way that the access latency of client page requests is minimized. Due to the lack of communication from clients to the server, the server cannot know what a client needs at the current slot. We consider a broadcasting policy in which the server transmits, at each slot, the page which is most likely to be requested by the client, given the history of previous broadcasts. The policy is easily implementable since a simple recursive algorithm provides the conditional distribution of page requests at slot n from the same distribution at slot n-1. The policy derives broadcasting sequences which are periodic in steady state and incurs low latency for page requests as it is verified by extensive numerical experiments with a wide variety of page request processes. Hence, it provides a valuable method for designing broadcasting schedules for both correlated and uncorrelated page request sequences.