Impact of Redundant Version Number on the Cost of Accessing Broadcast Data in Mobile Computing

摘要

In a wireless mobile computing environment, large number of users with their low powered portable computers can retrieve information anywhere and anytime. Wireless data broadcasting as a way of disseminating information, provides all types of users global access to information. In an error-prone environment, the occurrence of access failures is quite often. The recovery of each bucket affected by a packet error has been proposed in the different access method. However, update of broadcast data, which further complicates the recovery process, has not been discussed. First in this paper, based upon the Entire Path Replication scheme, update if any can be detected using the two complementary components of version number. Second, to recover the affected bucket, the proposed access methods make use of only the replicated buckets. In this process, to reduce the size of the broadcast the redundant version number per broadcast are identified and discarded. A performance analysis is given to show that the exclusion of redundant version number in non-replicated and data bucket considerably reduce the cost of accessing the broadcast data.