Scheduling on airdisks: efficient access to personalized information services via periodic wireless data broadcast

There has been considerable interest in delivering information to distributed mobile clients via wireless broadcast. Information transmitted periodically over wireless media can be regarded as a virtual disk, which we call an airdisk, analogous to a standard magnetic disk. Airdisks offer an efficient mechanism for delivering personalized information services to mobile clients with portable or laptop computers by broadcasting data and allowing clients to filter out the items of interest to them. We study the problem of scheduling the order in which data items are broadcast so as to minimize the access time of the clients, focusing on the case where the server inserts an index at the start of the broadcast period. We observe that the problem is analogous to that of determining how data should be laid out on the disk, and show that the problem is in general NP-complete. We develop a branch-and-bound procedure for solving the problem optimally, and then develop a fast, simple heuristic. The results of our simulation experiments show that the heuristic runs substantially faster than the branch-and-bound procedure, and yet produces schedules that are only slightly longer