Efficient data dissemination to mobile clients in e-commerce applications

Mobile commerce is the next growing area in electronic commerce and mobile computing. These are sophisticated, data-intensive mobile applications whose success depends strongly on the efficiency by which data are disseminated to a large number of mobile users. Different techniques have been put forward, of which the most promising are the push-based techniques that explore the asymmetry in wireless communications and the reduced energy consumption of the receiving mode on mobile devices. This paper proposes a new broadcast indexing scheme, termed “constant-size I-node distributed indexing” (CI), that offers more energy savings in practical applications. Our detailed simulation results indicate that CI, which is a variant of the currently best-performing distributed indexing scheme, outperforms the latter for broadcast sizes of 12,000 or fewer data items, reducing the access time by up to 25% and the tuning time by up to 15%