This paper studies a heterogeneous multiple channel environment (HMCE), in which the channels are controlled by different wireless operators. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous research on this scenario. In this paper, we first present the architecture for HMCE which makes use of a centralized index server to broadcast index information about the broadcast data on a dedicated index channel. An analog can be drawn between HMCE and WWW: the wireless operators are web sites and the index channel is Google; Google indexes web pages so that users can find the web pages they want, whereas in HMCE the index channel indexes the data channels to help mobile users to find the data on the air. We propose three indexing methods to reduce the time and energy used to search for data in HMCE. Simulation results are obtained to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods.
Andrew Y. Ho, Dik Lun Lee