Data Dissemination to a Large Mobile Network: Simulation of Broadcast Clouds

Research in data broadcasting in a wireless network has addressed the problems of what to broadcast and how to schedule the broadcasts. However, it is still not clear whether a single broadcast for the entire network, or an individual broadcast for each wireless cell is should be prepared. Recently, we proposed the Broadcast Clouds (BC) technique that bunches together wireless cells based on a cost saving principle, and prepares a common broadcast for these. This would presumably reduce the bandwidth cost and increase the service provider's profit. In this paper, we describe our simulation software, BCSIM, that we use to evaluate the performance of the BC approach, and present the results.