Index hint for on-demand broadcasting

We describe an index hint mechanism for on-demand data broadcast environments, which enables mobile clients to spend less power consumption by reducing their tuning times. We propose approaches to estimate the data broadcast times for a set of data items so that the index mechanism can be applied to on-demand data broadcasts. We also propose how to organize and apply index hints using the estimated broadcast times of data items. Our simulation results show that the proposed index hint mechanism effectively reduces the tuning times of mobile clients, thereby reducing their power consumption.