NICD: a novel indexless wireless on-demand data broadcast algorithm

Data dissemination by broadcast is the most cost-effective and scalable solution for the asymmetric mobile environment. Usually, data objects in periodic broadcast schedule are interleaved with index information to help mobile hosts (MHs) minimize their channel tuning time. On the contrary, presence of index information increases broadcast cycle length and hence the mean response time of MHs. There are many scheduling algorithms in literature which optimize either mean response time or tuning time or both (at least for suboptimal solution). We propose a novel on-demand broadcast algorithm, named NICD (normalized intercluster distance), which eliminates the need for indexing the broadcast schedule by enabling MHs compute the required index information themselves. Rural health care (RHC) system is just one application of the proposed algorithm. Simulation-based experiments are carried out with synthetic data, and it is observed that it effectively eliminates the need for indexing at the computational overhead of O(N²), where N is the number of clusters present in the collected information; and this is insignificant when compared against communication overhead due to the presence of index.