Broadcast Scheduling in Information Delivery Systems

Information broadcasting is an effective method to deliver popular information packages to a large number of users in wireless and satellite networks. We address the problem of broadcast scheduling in the pull environment and try to solve this problem by formulating it as a dynamic optimization problem. This approach allows us to find a near-optimal scheduling policy, which we use as a benchmark to evaluate a number of other existing heuristic policies. Also, in addition to providing a solution for the usual case with Poisson arrivals and equal priority pages, our approach enables us to address extended versions of this problem with other arrival processes and with distinct weights assigned to different pages.