An Improved Algorithm to Optimize the Access Time of Data Broadcast in Mobile Computing Environments

Abstract

With its large market potential and large amounts of clients, mobile data broadcasting has been a very essential part of nowadays communication. As mobile data broadcasting become more important, the algorithm to make it more efficient has been a highly-focused area of scientists in related field. A algorithm called Naive Approach Schedule Algorithm (NASA for short) was presented by some professors. Its aim is to optimize average data access time as much as possible. It can be divided into 2 main stages: determine data's broadcasting ratio; determine data items' broadcasting schedule. However, data's broadcasting ratio is not accurately calculated, which affects the performance of this algorithm directly. This paper proposes an algorithm based on Naive Approach Schedule Algorithm to optimize the access time of a data schedule. It calculates data's broadcasting ratio carefully, and make the ratio close to its optimized value. At the same time, a small change is made in determining data items' broadcasting schedule. Features of the algorithm presented in this paper are shown and related experiments are conducted. The result shows that, compared with NASA algorithm, it has almost the same average accessing time with relatively longer period. In other words, when their periods are the same, its performance is relatively better. And it maintains other important features of NASA algorithm.