Exponential index: A parameterized distributed indexing scheme for data on air

Wireless data broadcast has received a lot of attention from industries and academia in recent years. Access efficiency and energy conservation are two critical performance concerns in a wireless data broadcast environment. To improve the efficiency of energy consumption on mobile devices, traditional disk-based indexing techniques such as B ⁺-tree have been extended to index broadcast data on a wireless channel. However, existing designs are mostly based on centralized tree structures. Most of these indexing techniques are not flexible in the sense that the trade-off between access efficiency and energy conservation is not adjustable based on application specific requirements. We propose in this paper a novel parameterized index, called the exponential index, which can be tuned to optimize the access latency with the tuning time bounded by a given limit, and vice versa. The proposed index is very efficient because it facilitates replication naturally by sharing links in multiple search trees and thus minimizes storage overhead. Experimental results show that the exponential index not only achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art indexes but also enables great flexibility in trade-offs between access latency and tuning time.