Power efficient filtering of data on air

Abstract

Organizing massive amount of information on communication channels is a new challenge to the data management and telecommunication communities. In this paper, we consider wireless data broadcasting as a way of disseminating information to a massive number of battery powered palmtops. We show that different physical requirements of the wireless digital medium make the problem of organizing wireless broadcast data different from data organization on the disk. We demonstrate that providing index or hashing based access to the data transmitted over wireless is very important for extending battery life and can result in very significant improvement in battery utilization. We describe two methods (Hashing and Flexible Indexing) for organizing and accessing broadcast data in such a way that two basic parameters: tuning time, which affects battery life, and access time (waiting time for data) are minimized.