Set-based broadcast scheduling for minimizing the worst access time of multiple data items in wireless environments

In wireless environments, data broadcast can offer unlimited mobile users up-to-date and shareable information in the meantime. Traditional schemes favor popular queries and thus sacrifice unpopular queries. This paper considers a broadcast scheduling problem, minimizing the worst access time for both popular and unpopular queries. Five useful heuristics and one anomaly are discovered, by which we can deal with this NP-hard problem properly. In our findings, the problem can be solved optimally if mobile users’ access patterns present in some particular forms. Three algorithms are proposed and their near-optimality is shown in the experimental results.