Data Organization and Retrieval on Parallel Air Channels: Performance and Energy Issues

Our interest in the global information sharing process is motivated by the advances in communication and computation technologies, the marriage between the two technologies, and the almost limitless amount of information available on the network. Within the scope of the global information sharing process, when a user's request (potentially mobile) is directed to public data, broadcasting has been suggested as an effective mechanism to access data. The effectiveness of the schemes to retrieve public data is determined by their ability to reduce the access latency and power consumed by the mobile unit. Various indexing techniques can be used to further improve the effectiveness of retrieving broadcast data. This paper addresses the application of object indexing in parallel broadcast channels. In addition, to further reduce access latency, it proposes several scheduling schemes to order accesses to the data objects on parallel channels. The proposed schemes are simulated, and analyzed. Our simulation results indicate that the employment of indexing scheme and proper scheduling of object retrieval along the parallel channels drastically reduces both the access latency and power consumption at the mobile unit.