On-demand broadcast for multiple-item requests in a multiple-channel environment

On-demand broadcast is an effective approach to disseminating data in mobile computing environments. Substantial efforts have been devoted to improving the scheduling efficiency of on-demand broadcast. Previous studies focused mainly on the case of scheduling single-item requests in single-channel environments. However, requesting multiple dependent data items is common in many advanced applications such as electronic stock trading and traffic information enquiry services. In addition, multi-channel architectures are widely deployed in data broadcast systems. In this work, we investigate the issues arising in scheduling multi-item requests in multi-channel on-demand broadcast environments. Two problems, namely, the request starvation problem and the bandwidth utilization problem are identified in existing algorithms. To tackle the observed problems, an innovative algorithm is proposed. Results from our simulation study demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.