Scheduling time-critical requests for multiple data objects in on-demand broadcast

On-demand broadcast is an effective data dissemination approach in mobile computing environments. Most of the recent studies on on-demand data broadcast assume that clients request only a single-data-object at a time. This assumption may not be practical for the increasingly sophisticated mobile applications. In this paper, we investigate the scheduling problem of time-critical requests for multiple data objects in on-demand broadcast environments and observe that existing scheduling algorithms designed for single-data-object requests perform unsatisfactorily in this new setting. Based on our analysis, we propose new algorithms to improve the system performance. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.