INFORMATION-PROVIDING

MECHANISM COMBINING
BROADCAST AND ON-DEMAND MODES
IN MOBILE COMPUTING
ENVIRONMENTS
Masanori Tanabe, Satoshi Hakomori, and Ushio Inoue

Laboratory for Information Technology

NTT Data Corporation
Kawasaki city,
Kanagawa 210 Japan
tanbe@lit.rd.nttdata.co.jp

Abstract: People with portable computers are to be able to retrieve a

variety of information at any time and at any location by using wireless com-
munication systems. Since the bandwidth of wireless communication systems
is narrower than that of wired communication systems, however, it is difficult
for servers to use wireless systems to send much information to many clients.
This paper proposes an information-providing mechanism combining broadcast
and on-demand modes of data delivery. The broadcast mode enables a server
to support many clients via narrow bandwidth and the on-demand modes en-
ables each client to access different data. An algorithm deciding which data
should be broadcasted is presented. It minimizes expected length of waiting
time of clients to get needed data from the server. Evaluation results show the
effectiveness of this algorithm.
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1 INTRODUCTlON
Recent advances in wireless communication technologies have made it possible
for portable computer users to access databases in remote servers at any time
and at any location. A variety of information services for many users will be
provided soon, but the limited bandwidth available in wireless communication
systems causes following problems[1] [2]:

(a) When many users access databases at the same time, the communication
channel becomes busy and some clients have to wait until others finish
their access to the databases.
(b) Since the data transfer rate is generally lower than those of wired com-
munication systems, users need to wait a long time whenever they access
large amounts of data, such as graphic, audio and video data.

To relax the problems caused by the bandwidth limitation, broadcasting

should be utilized in nature of wireless communication. However, it will take
a long time to broadcast a large amount of data due to their low data transfer
rates. This results in very long waiting time for users to get data they need. We
are developing an information system with a mechanism combining broadcast
and on-demand modes of data delivery. Our assumptions on the environments
where our system will be used are the following:

(a) Data which depends on each location is provided in the fixed area such
as museums and exhibition halls.
(b) Each user with a portable computer wants to get the information while
in the fixed area.
(c) A wireless communication system with relatively narrow bandwidth and
low speed is used to deliver data from servers to users.
(d) There may be many users in each area, and they may want to get data
from the server at the same time.

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes two kinds of conven-

tional information-providing mechanisms using a wireless communication sys-
tem. Section 3 presents the structure of our information-providing system with
a new mechanism combining broadcast and on-demand modes. It also presents
how to decide which data is to be broadcasted. Section 4 shows evaluation
results of the new mechanism. Section 5 refers a related work by Imielinski et
al. Section 6 concludes by summarizing this paper and mentioning our plan for
future work.