Performance analysis of data scheduling algorithms for multi-item requests in multi-channel broadcast environments

Nowadays querying multiple-dependent data items in a request is common in many advanced mobile applications, such as traffic information enquiry services. In addition, multi-channel architectures are widely deployed in many data dissemination systems. In this paper, we extend a number of data productivity-based scheduling algorithms and evaluate their performance in scheduling multi-item requests in multi-channel broadcast environments. We observe from the experimental results two performance problems that render these algorithms ineffective. Lastly, we discuss possible causes of these problems to give insights in the design of a better solution. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.