Broadcast scheduling for information distribution.pdf

Wireless Networks 0 (1998) ?{? 1 Broadcast Scheduling for Information Distribution Chi-Jiun Su a; Leandros Tassiulas b; Vassilis J. Tsotras c;a Department of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn NY 11201E-mail: cjsu@b Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742E-mail: leandros@c Department of Computer Science, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521E-mail: tsotras@Broadcast data delivery is encountered in many applications where there is a need to disseminate information to alarge user community in a wireless asymmetric communication environment. In this paper, we consider the problem ofscheduling the data broadcast such that average response time experienced by the users is low. In a push-based system,where the users cannot place requests directly to the server and the broadcast schedule should be determined based solelyon the access probabilities, we formulate a deterministic dynamic optimization problem, the solution of which providesthe optimal broadcast schedule. Properties of the optimal solution are obtained and then we propose a suboptimaldynamic policy which achieves average response time close to the lower bound. The policy has low complexity, it isadaptive to changing access statistics, and is easily generalizable to multiple broadcast channels. In a pull-based systemwhere the users may place requests about information items directly to the server, the scheduling can be based on thenumber of pending requests for each item. Suboptimal policies with good performance are obtained in this case as well.Finally, it is demonstrated by a numerical study that as the request generation rate increases, the achievable performanceof the pull- and push-based systems becomes almost identical.Keywords: Broadcast Data Delivery, Information Distribution methods, Data Push/Pull, Multicast.1. IntroductionBroadcast data delivery is rapidly becoming themethod of choice for disseminating information to