Optimal memory management strategies for a mobile user in a broadcast data delivery system

Data broadcasting has been considered as a promising way of disseminating information to a massive number of users in a wireless communication environment. In a broadcast data delivery system, there is a server which is broadcasting data to a user community. Due to the lack of communication from the users to the server, the server cannot know what a user needs. In order to access a certain item, a user has to wait until the item appears in the broadcast. The waiting time will be considerably long if the server's broadcast schedule does not match the user's access needs. If a user has a local memory, it can alleviate its access latency by selectively prefetching the items from the broadcast and storing them in the memory. A good memory management strategy can substantially reduce the user's access latency, which is a major concern in a broadcast data delivery system. An optimal memory management policy is identified that minimizes the expected aggregate latency. We present optimal memory update strategies with limited look ahead as implementable approximations of the optimal policy. Some interesting special cases are given for which the limited look-ahead policies are optimal. We also show that the same formulation can be used to find the optimal memory management policy which minimizes the number of deadline misses when users generate information requests which have to be satisfied within some given deadlines