Data broadcasting for dependent information using multiple channels in wireless broadcast environments

Data broadcasting is an effective approach to disseminating information to mobile clients and has attracted much research attention in recent years. In many applications, the access pattern among the data can be represented by a weighted DAG. In this paper, we consider the problem of efficiently generating the broadcast schedules on multiple channels when the data set has a DAG access pattern. We show that it is NP-hard to find an optimal broadcast schedule which not only minimizes the latency but also satisfies the ancestor property that retains the data dependency. We further derive a condition for the input DAGs under which one can generate an optimal broadcast schedule in linear time and propose an algorithm to generate the schedule. Due to the NP-completeness, we provide three heuristics for general DAGs based on the level of a vertex in the input DAGs and each heuristic uses a different policy to place vertices into the broadcast channels. There are two categories for the policies. The first category mainly considers the probability for a process to stop at a considered vertex. The second category takes the vertices which are affected most when assigning a vertex into consideration. We analyze and discuss these heuristics. A short experimental simulation is given for supporting and validating the discussion. In particular, the experimental results indicate that roughly considering the whole posterior vertices of each vertex is not precise and may not lead to good results and considering the vertices affected most when assigning a vertex will help reducing the latency.     

Power-aware data retrieval protocols for indexed broadcast parallel channels

In pervasive and mobile computing environments, “timely and reliable” access to public data requires methods that allow quick, efficient, and low-power access to information to overcome technological limitations of wireless communication and access devices. The literature suggests broadcasting (one-way communication) as an effective way to disseminate the public data to mobile devices. Within the scope of broadcasting, the response time and energy consumption of retrieval methods have been used as the performance metrics for measuring the effectiveness of different access methods. The hardware and architecture of the mobile units offer different operational modes that consume different energy levels. Along with these architectural and hardware enhancements, techniques such as indexing, broadcasting along parallel channels, and efficient allocation and retrieval protocols can be used to minimize power consumption and access latency.In general, the retrieval methods attempt to determine the optimal access pattern for retrieving the requested data objects on parallel broadcast channels. The employment of heuristics provides a methodology for such ideal path planning solutions. Using informative heuristics and intelligent searches of an access forest can provide a prioritized cost evaluation of access patterns for requested data objects and, hence, an optimal path for the access of requested data on broadcast air channels.This paper examines two scheduling methods that along with a set of heuristics generate and facilitate the access patterns for retrieving data objects in the presence of conflicts in an indexed parallel broadcast channel environment. A simulation of the proposed schemes is presented for analyzing the relationship between response time and power consumption.     

Effective Data Placement for Wireless Broadcast

This paper investigates how to place data objects on air for wireless broadcast such that mobile clients can access the data in short latency. We first define and analyze the problem of wireless data placement, and also propose a measure, named Query Distance (QD), which represents the coherence degree of data set accessed by a query. We show that the problem is NP-complete, and then propose an effective data placement method that constructs the broadcast schedule by appending each query's data set in greedy way. We show through performance experiments that the proposed method reduces the access time of mobile query.     

Energy- and Latency-Efficient Processing of Full-Text Searches on a Wireless Broadcast Stream

In wireless mobile computing environments, broadcasting is an effective and scalable technique to disseminate information to a massive number of clients, wherein the energy usage and latency are considered major concerns. This paper presents an indexing scheme for the energy- and latency-efficient processing of full-text searches over the wireless broadcast data stream. Although a lot of access methods and index structures have been proposed in the past for full-text searches, all of them are targeted for data in disk storage, not wireless broadcast channels. For full-text searches on a wireless broadcast stream, we firstly introduce a naive, inverted list-style indexing method, where inverted lists are placed in front of the data on the wireless channel. In order to reduce the latency overhead, we propose a two-level indexing method which adds another level of index structure to the basic inverted list-style index. In addition, we propose a replication strategy of the index list and index tree to further improve the latency performance. We analyze the performance of the proposed indexing scheme with respect to the latency and energy usage measures, and show the optimality of index replication. The correctness of the analysis is demonstrated through simulation experiments, and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is shown by implementing a real wireless information delivery system.     

An efficient stream structure for broadcasting the encrypted XML data in mobile wireless broadcast channels

In mobile wireless broadcast networks, XML data is encrypted before it is sent over the broadcast channel in order to ensure the confidentiality of XML data. In these networks, mobile clients must not have access to all the XML data; rather they should have access to some parts of the XML data that are relevant to them and to which they are authorized to have access. In this paper, a new encrypted XML data stream structure is proposed which supports the confidentiality of XML data over the broadcast channel. In our proposed stream structure, the size of encrypted XML data stream is reduced by grouping the paths, XML nodes, texts, and attributes together. The proposed structure includes several indexes to skip from irrelevant data over the broadcast channel. The experimental results demonstrate that the use of our proposed stream structure efficiently disseminates XML data in mobile wireless broadcast networks in a secure manner and the indexes in our proposed stream structure improve the performance of XML query processing over the encrypted XML data stream.

     

Effective protocols for kNN search on broadcast multi-dimensional index trees

In a wireless mobile environment, data broadcasting provides an efficient way to disseminate data. Via data broadcasting, a server can provide location-based services to a large client population in a wireless environment. Among different location-based services, the k nearest neighbors (kNN) search is important and is used to find the k closest objects to a given point. However, the kNN search in a broadcast environment is particularly challenging due to the sequential access to the data on a broadcast channel. We propose efficient protocols for the kNN search on a broadcast R-tree, which is a popular multi-dimensional index tree, in a wireless broadcast environment in terms of latency and tuning time as well as memory usage. We investigate how a server schedules the broadcast and provide the corresponding kNN search algorithms at the mobile clients. One of our kNN search protocols further allows a kNN search to start at an arbitrary time instance and it can skip the waiting time for the beginning of a broadcast cycle, thereby reducing the latency. The experimental results validate that our mechanisms achieve the objectives.     

An efficient nonuniform index in the wireless broadcast environments

Data broadcast is an efficient dissemination method to deliver information to mobile clients through the wireless channel. It allows a huge number of the mobile clients simultaneously access data in the wireless environments. In real-life applications, more popular data may be frequently accessed by clients than less popular ones. Under such scenarios, Acharya et al.’s Broadcast Disks algorithm (BD) allocates more popular data appeared more times in a broadcast period than less popular ones, i.e., the nonuniform broadcast, and provides a good performance on reducing client waiting time. However, mobile devices should constantly tune in to the wireless broadcast channel to examine data, consuming a lot of energy. Using index technologies on the broadcast file can reduce a lot of energy consumption of the mobile devices without significantly increasing client waiting time. In this paper, we propose an efficient nonuniform index called the skewed index, SI, over BD. The proposed algorithm builds an index tree according to skewed access patterns of clients, and allocates index nodes for the popular data more times than those for the less popular ones in a broadcast cycle. From our experimental study, we have shown that our proposed algorithm outperforms the flexible index and the flexible distributed index.     

Query processing optimization in broadcasting XML data in mobile communications

Todays, XML as a de facto standard is used to broadcast data over mobile wireless networks. In these networks, mobile clients send their XML queries over a wireless broadcast channel and recieve their desired XML data from the channel. However, downloading the whole XML data by a mobile device is a challenge since the mobile devices used by clients are small battery powered devices with limited resources. To meet this challenge, the XML data should be indexed in such a way that the desired XML data can be found easily and only such data can be downloaded instead of the whole XML data by the mobile clients. Several indexing methods are proposed to selectively access the XML data over an XML stream. However, the existing indexing methods cause an increase in the size of XML stream by including some extra information over the XML stream. In this paper, a new XML stream structure is proposed to disseminate the XML data over a broadcast channel by grouping and summarizing the structural information of XML nodes. By summarizing such information, the size of XML stream can be reduced and therefore, the latency of retrieving the desired XML data over a wirless broadcast channel can be reduced. The proposed XML stream structure also contains indexes in order to skip from the irrelevant parts over the XML stream. It therefore can reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices in downloading the results of XML queries. In addition, our proposed XML stream structure can process different types of XML queries and experimental results showed that it improves the performace of XML query processing over the XML data stream compared to the existing research works in terms of access and tuning times.

     

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.     

Exploiting data mining techniques for broadcasting data in mobile computing environments

Mobile computers can be equipped with wireless communication devices that enable users to access data services from any location. In wireless communication, the server-to-client (downlink) communication bandwidth is much higher than the client-to-server (uplink) communication bandwidth. This asymmetry makes the dissemination of data to client machines a desirable approach. However, dissemination of data by broadcasting may induce high access latency in case the number of broadcast data items is large. We propose two methods aiming to reduce client access latency of broadcast data. Our methods are based on analyzing the broadcast history (i.e., the chronological sequence of items that have been requested by clients) using data mining techniques. With the first method, the data items in the broadcast disk are organized in such a way that the items requested subsequently are placed close to each other. The second method focuses on improving the cache hit ratio to be able to decrease the access latency. It enables clients to prefetch the data from the broadcast disk based on the rules extracted from previous data request patterns. The proposed methods are implemented on a Web log to estimate their effectiveness. It is shown through performance experiments that the proposed rule-based methods are effective in improving the system performance in terms of the average latency as well as the cache hit ratio of mobile clients.     

Semantic Access to Multichannel M-Services

M-services provide mobile users wireless access to Web services. In this paper, we present a novel infrastructure for supporting M-services in wireless broadcast systems. The proposed infrastructure provides a generic framework for mobile users to look up, access, and execute Web services over wireless broadcast channels. Access efficiency is an important issue in wireless broadcast systems. We discuss different semantics that have impact on the access efficiency for composite M-services. A multiprocess workflow is proposed for effectively accessing composite M-services from multiple broadcast channels based on these semantics. We also present and compare different broadcast channel organizations for M-services and wireless data. Analytical models are provided for these channel organizations. Practical studies are presented to demonstrate the impact of different semantics and channel organizations on the access efficiency.     

An indexing method for wireless broadcast XML data

The paper considers a wireless information system, wherein various pieces of information represented in XML are broadcast via wireless channels, and mobile clients access the broadcast stream using energy-restricted portable devices.In this paper, we propose a wireless XML streaming method designed to provide energy-efficient access to a wireless stream. We construct two hierarchical structures to represent the XML data and their index information, called the XML data tree and XML index tree, respectively. The wireless XML stream is generated by traversing these two structures with some replications. We design three data/index replication strategies (PP, TT, and TP) in the streaming method. We compare the proposed streaming method with a naı¨ve method called the (1, X) method both analytically and experimentally. Also, based on our analysis results, we determine the optimal method of replication.     

A concurrency control scheme for mobile transactions in broadcast disk environments

Broadcast disk technique has been often used to disseminate frequently requested data efficiently to a large volume of mobile clients over wireless channels. In broadcast disk environments, a server often broadcasts different data items with differing frequencies to reflect the skewed data access patterns of mobile clients. Previously proposed concurrency control methods for mobile transactions in wireless broadcast environments are focused on the mobile transactions with uniform data access patterns. These protocols perform poorly in broadcast disk environments where the data access patterns of mobile transactions are skewed. In broadcast disk environments, the time length of a broadcast cycle usually becomes large to reflect the skewed data access patterns. This will often cause read-only transactions to access old data items rather than the latest data items. Furthermore, updating mobile transactions will be frequently aborted and restarted in the final validation stage due to the update conflict of the same data items with high access frequencies. This problem will increase the average response time of the update mobile transactions and waste the uplink communication bandwidth. In this paper, we extend the existing FBOCC concurrency control method to efficiently handle mobile transactions with skewed data access patterns in broadcast disk environments. Our method allows read-only transactions to access the more updated data, and reduces the average response time of updating transactions through early aborts and restarts. Our method also reduces the amount of uplink communication bandwidth for the final validation of the update transactions. We present an in-depth experimental analysis of our method by comparing with existing concurrency control protocols. Our performance analysis shows that it significantly decreases the average response time and the amount of uplink bandwidths over existing methods.     

An energy-efficient and access latency optimized indexing scheme for wireless data broadcast

Data broadcast is an attractive data dissemination method in mobile environments. To improve energy efficiency, existing air indexing schemes for data broadcast have focused on reducing tuning time only, i.e., the duration that a mobile client stays active in data accesses. On the other hand, existing broadcast scheduling schemes have aimed at reducing access latency through nonflat data broadcast to improve responsiveness only. Not much work has addressed the energy efficiency and responsiveness issues concurrently. This paper proposes an energy-efficient indexing scheme called MHash that optimizes tuning time and access latency in an integrated fashion. MHash reduces tuning time by means of hash-based indexing and enables nonflat data broadcast to reduce access latency. The design of hash function and the optimization of bandwidth allocation are investigated in depth to refine MHash. Experimental results show that, under skewed access distribution, MHash outperforms state-of-the-art air indexing schemes and achieves access latency close to optimal broadcast scheduling.     

Mobile broadcast services with MIMO antennae in 4G wireless networks

The deployment of wireless data broadcast to empower mobile information services as a resource-conserving means offers significant benefits due to the scalability feature offered by the technology. In this paper, we present a novel and holistic data broadcast management approach in 4 G wireless networks with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennae. The proposed scheme consists of three elements, namely: (i) broadcast ordering; (ii) Global indexing; and (iii) merging data structure. With the integration of these elements, we expect to obtain substantial efficiency for mobile computing clients when retrieving data on-air. We have experimentally evaluated the performance of the proposed model including comparison with the relevant schemes. The results from the experiments affirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach in respect to minimizing query access time and conserving energy utilization of the clients.     

A Hybrid Index Technique for Power Efficient Data Broadcast

The intention of power conservative indexing techniques for wireless data broadcast is to reduce mobile client tune-in time while maintaining an acceptable data access time. In this paper, we investigate indexing techniques based on index trees and signatures for data disseminated on a broadcast channel. Moreover, a hybrid indexing method combining strengths of the signature and the index tree techniques is proposed. Different from previous studies, our research takes into consideration of two important data organization factors, namely, clustering and scheduling. Cost models for the three indexing methods are derived for various data organization accommodating these two factors. Based on our analytical comparisons, the signature and the hybrid indexing techniques are the best choices for power conservative indexing of various data organization on wireless broadcast channels.     

Tree-based data retrieval algorithm for multi-item request with deadline in wireless networks

The data retrieval problem in wireless communication has attracted increasing attentions in many applications such as electronic information sharing and e-business. However, most existing studies do not consider how to retrieve the requested data items in their deadlines. In this paper, we discuss the so-called deadline-based multi-item data retrieval problem, which aims at finding an access pattern for retrieving requested data items in certain deadlines such that the access latency and data miss rate are minimized. We propose two algorithms, named EDFS and UR, to deal with the above problem. The EDFS algorithm gives priority to retrieve the requested data item with the least deadline, while the UR algorithm introduces the urgent rate that is computed by the broadcast time and deadline of requested data item for further reducing the access latency and data miss ratio. Moreover, we design a tree-based data retrieval algorithm that finds the longest downloading sequence of data items in one broadcast cycle and is applied to EDFS and UR for finding data retrieval sequence of requested data items. The efficiency of our proposed schemes has been validated by the extensive experiments.     

Optimal Broadcasting of Two Files over an Asymmetric Channel

We study the problem of scheduling files over a broadcast channel in an asymmetric environment. The goal is to minimize the mean response time for clients who access the broadcast channel. Asymmetric channels have gained a lot of attention because they are used to model wireless ccxnmunication, teletext systems, and web caching in satellite systems. This paper addresses the two-files case. We design a simple algorithm that defines the optimal schedule given the demand probability for each file. Our solution is extended to include other important factors, such as dependencies between files, variable-length files, and other extensions, such as different priorities for the clients. For all the above extensions, we prove the surprising result that there exists a simple optimal schedule. Such a schedule is composed of a repeated pattern of AA…AB, where A is the more “popular” file and B is the less “popular” file.     

多盘广播的偏斜索引算法

在移动环境中,多盘广播是被广泛使用的数据广播调度算法之一。为广播数据建立索引可以使移动客户机选择性地监听信道,以减少电源消耗,但过多地插入索引会增加数据访问时间。针对该问题,为多盘广播建立偏斜索引,设计索引树构造算法和广播数据的索引树算法。与可变扇出算法相比,多盘广播的偏斜索引算法需要的平均访问时间和平均调谐时间较短。     

PS+Pre/Post: A novel structure and access mechanism for wireless XML stream supporting twig pattern queries

XML data broadcast is an efficient way to disseminate XML data to a large number of mobile clients in mobile wireless networks. Recently, several indexing methods have been proposed to improve the performance of XML query processing in terms of access time and tuning time over XML streams. However, existing indexing methods cannot process twig pattern XML queries. In this paper, we propose a novel structure for streaming XML data called PS+Pre/Post by integrating the path summary technique and the pre/post labeling scheme. Our proposed XML stream structure exploits the benefits of the path summary technique and the pre/post labeling scheme to efficiently process different types of XML queries over the broadcast stream. Experimental results show that our proposed XML stream structure improves the performance of access time and tuning time in processing different types of XML queries.