Evaluation and comparison of various indexing schemes in single-channel broadcast communication environment

Wireless Data Broadcasting is a newly developed data dissemination method for spreading public information to a tremendous number of mobile subscribers. Access Latency and Tuning Time are two main criteria to evaluate the performance of such system. With the help of indexing technology, clients can reduce tuning time significantly by searching indices first and turning to doze mode during waiting period. Different indexing schemes perform differently, so we can hardly compare the efficiency of different indexing schemes. In this paper, we redesigned several most popular indexing schemes for data broadcasting systems, i.e., distributed index, exponential index, hash table, and Huffman tree index. We created a unified communication model and constructed a novel evaluation strategy by using the probability theory to formulate the performance of each scheme theoretically and then conducted simulations to compare their performance by numerical experiments. This is the first work to provide scalable communication environment and accurate evaluation strategies. Our communication model can easily be modified to meet specific requirements. Our comparison model can be used by the service providers to evaluate other indexing schemes to choose the best one for their systems.