Access to Broadcast M-services: Issues and Challenges

In this chapter, we discuss the need for new access methods and an accompanying infrastructure for broadcast based M-services. The infrastructure of traditional wireless broadcast systems cannot keep up with the rapid development of wireless technologies and the fast increasing wireless services. It is getting more difficult for mobile users to find suitable wireless services. Existing infrastructure also does not facilitate collaboration of multiple services. In this book, we discuss applying Web services technologies into wireless broadcast environments and propose a new Mservices infrastructure. One of the most important issues in broadcast environments is efficient access to broadcast information. A wide range of work has been done in the past two decades in studying efficient access in traditional data wireless broadcast systems. However, new access methods are needed due to the following new challenges for broadcast M-services systems:

• Access pattern: Accessing M-services is a different process from accessing data and has a different access pattern.

  Service dependencies: Services could have various dependencies between each other that could affect access efficiency.

  Service-data dependencies: Each service could request for one or more data items. Access methods should consider the dependencies between services and their required data.

  Access semantics: There are a few semantics that have impact on access efficiency and should be considered by access methods.

The focus of this book is to investigate efficient access methods for broadcast based M-services. The new access methods should address the challenges mentioned above.