POWER-AWARE DATA RETRIEVAL PROTOCOLS FOR INDEXED BROADCAST PARALLEL CHANNELS

In pervasive and mobile computing environments, “timely and reliable ” access to public data requires methods that allow quick, efficient, and low-power access to information to overcome technological limitations of wireless communication and access devices. Literature suggests broadcasting (one-way communication) as an effective way to disseminate the public data to mobile devices. Within the scope of broadcasting, the response time and energy consumption of retrieval methods have been used as the performance metrics to measure the effectiveness of different access methods. The hardware and architecture of the mobile units offer different operational modes that consume different energy levels. Along with these architectural and hardware enhancements, techniques such as indexing, broadcasting along parallel channels, and efficient allocation and retrieval protocols can be used to minimize power consumption and access latency. In general, the retrieval methods attempt to determine the optimal access pattern to retrieve the requested data objects on parallel broadcast channels. The employment of heuristics provides a methodology for such ideal path planning solutions. Using informative heuristics an