Review

In recent years, broadcasting of data to mobile users has attracted the attention of many researchers, almost all of whom have focussed on meeting the demands of users via a single broadcast channel. Questions that have been investigated include: what data to broadcast? how to schedule the broadcast? how to interleave the broadcasting of index with the data?
The current authors reexamine these questions in case multiple broadcast channels are present. Two additional questions arise: (1) how should the data chosen for broadcasting be allocated to the various channels? and (2) how should mobile users surf the channels to obtain the data of interest to them?
Authors propose a set of fairly simple approaches to address these issues. Their simulation results show that, in the context of their algorithms, for improved performance it is important (a) for a broadcast server to dynamically adapt what is broadcast and along which channel based on the workload changes and (b) for users to search for the desired data in channels which are "in and around" the channel along which the data had been previously received.
Given that this is one of the first to explore multiple channels, alternative strategies can be expected in the near future.

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