The Study of Multichannel Broadcast Mechanism in 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 that constructs the broadcast channels according to the access frequency of each type of message in order to save power in mobile stations. The pinwheel scheduling algorithm presented in this paper is used to organize all types of messages in the broadcast channels in the most symmetrical distribution in order to reduce both the tuning and access time. The multichannel broadcast mechanism is also discussed for use when the number of message types increases. The performance of the proposed mechanism is analyzed, and the improvement over existing methods is demonstrated numerically. The results show that the proposed mechanism is capable improving both the tuning and access time due to the presence of skewness in the access distribution among the disseminated messages. When the number of message types increase, both the tuning and access time can be further improved as long as a small number of broadcast channels are added.