Association-Rules Mining Based Broadcasting Approach for XML Data

Mobile databases are becoming more available and thus are drawing more attention from both research and industrial communities. They are currently being widely used in devices such as cell phones, hand-held devices, and notebook computers, among others. Broadcasting is a scalable way to send data from a server to multiple clients. Broadcasting algorithms must be constructed in a way that minimizes the average waiting time for clients. XML is a new standard for representing data in a hierarchical structure, and has many advantages over relational representations due to its portability, flexibility, readability, and customizability. XML has recently been deployed onto many mobile devices; thus a new kind of broadcasting algorithm should be constructed to address the unique characteristics of the way XML databases are queried and accessed. In this paper, we presented a new kind of broadcasting algorithm (BA) by utilizing association-rules in clients' request trends. We implemented three BAs: namely, Exhaustive, Recursive, and Greedy. We tested and compared our BAs with the conventional BAs: namely Sequential and Popularity. The experimental results show that our BAs utilizing association rules perform better than the conventional BAs in both skewed-request situations and requests with association-rules.