Air Indexes for Spatial Databases

SYNONYMS None DEFINITION Air indexes refer to indexes employed in wireless broadcast environments to address scalability issue and to facilitate power saving on mobile devices [3]. To retrieve a data object in wireless broadcast systems, a mobile client has to continuously monitor the broadcast channel until the data arrives. This will consume a lot of energy since the client has to remain active during its waiting time. The basic idea of air indexes is that by including index information about the arrival times of data items on the broadcast channel, mobile clients are able to predict the arrivals of their desired data. Thus, they can stay in power saving mode during waiting time and switch to active mode only when the data of their interests arrives.