Group Introduction

We are a data broadcast research group within the Data Communication and Data Management Laboratory of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Our Lab is headed by professor Ding-Zhu Du and Weili Wu. Our focus is the design and analysis of various data engineering and data management problems in all kinds of database systems and wireless networking environments. We seek distributed, autonomous, robust and scalable algorithms for real world applications, but are also concerned that these algorithms have good theoretical merit. Currently, we are working on several topics on wireless data broadcast, including optimization strategies, system architectures, indexing technologies, and emerging data broadcast problems of the next generation wireless networks.

 

Data broadcast

Boosted by the maturating of high-speed wireless network and personal mobile device technology, mobile computing has become a research area of rapidly emerging interest. Recently, 3G networks together with smartphones make mobile computing in a wide range possible. Consequently, more mobile users will constantly need to access public information (for instance, stock price, local points of interest, real-time traffic and weather information) through the wireless connection. However, due to the technical limitations of mobile computing (such as insufficient bandwidth and power supply), how to disseminate data efficiently in the mobile computing environment has become a challenging problem. Data broadcast is an attractive solution for this problem because of its scalability and flexibility.

In a wireless data broadcast scheme, various data are broadcast periodically from a Base Station (BS, also known as Mobile Service Station) on some channels of particular frequencies within a transmission range. Clients in this range can access the channels and download the data. To cover a wide area, several regulatedly located BSs may work together, each taking charge for its local cell named microcell (usually known as hexagon, quadrangle, or triangle, depending on the geometric layout of BSs). Clients can move freely among cells. In contrast to a traditional point-to-point delivery, a data broadcast scheme allows a mass number of clients to simultaneously access the data and thus is more scalable. Broadcast technique also accommodates the asymmetric structures of most wireless systems in that clients simply "listen" to the broadcast channels, filter and pick the data they need, which alleviates the uplink channel load.

We are working on tutorial on various techniques related to wireless data broadcast. The section is coming soon.

 

Contact Information

Data Communication and Data Management Laboratory
Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas
800 West Campbell Rd., Richardson, TX 75080, USA