A Broadcast Mechanism Supporting Power-Conserving Mobile Stations*

Abstract

Power saving is an important issue in the mobile computing environment. In this paper, we propose a broadcast mechanism which constructs the broadcast channels according to the access frequency of each disseminated kind of message in order to save power in mobile stations. The pinwheel scheduling algorithm presented in this paper is used to organize all kinds of messages in the broadcast channels in a most symmetrical distribution for reducing both tuning time and access time. Performance of the proposed mechanism is analyzed and the improvement is demonstrated with numerical results. The results show that the proposed mechanism is capable improving both tuning time and access time as the skew access characteristic exists among the disseminated messages.