Adaptive Data Broadcasting Using Air-Cache

In the Data Air Waves Project at the University of Maryland, we are integrating Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) systems with terrestrial networks to provide a hybrid and effective communication substrate lying between data resources and remote/mobile user applications. Smooth integration of these two media balances the need for rapid data dissemination to very large numbers of clients and on-demand interactive data services. This paper describes the air-cache, a method for effective data broadcasting and an algorithm which rapidly adapts the content of the cache based on the “misses” which result in explicit (on-demand) data requests. Simulation results show that the hypothesis of adapting based only on the misses performs quite reasonable and has very little deviation from a system that has complete information – both hits and misses.