Information hovering: A new approach for performance acceleration of wireless push systems

Wireless data broadcasting systems are typically assigned limited operational bandwidth due to their usually wide spatial coverage. This limitation raises issues of increased client waiting times, especially as the total size of the data to be disseminated increases. This problem could be partially or fully resolved by offloading part of the data to local mobile ad hoc subsystems. To this end, a novel merging of wireless data broadcasting and information hovering is proposed. The information hovering subsystem handles the least popular data items, allowing the most popular ones to be efficiently disseminated through the central wireless broadcasting. Both bandwidth-greedy and bandwidth-conserving cooperation algorithms are proposed. The validity of the proposed merged scheme is evaluated through simulation in a realistic MANET with locality of data demand. The results show considerably decreased mean waiting times in any case.