In mobile distributed environment, data broadcasting has many applications because it has two desirable characteristics: energy efficiency and bandwidth efficiency. There have been some researches on the indexing mechanisms for wireless data broadcasting in the past. We first describe the problematic issue in the conventional index replication scheme, and then propose various index replication methods based on three criteria: accessibility, energy efficiency and adjacency. We evaluate the proposed scheme in analytic and experimental. ways. We show that the proposed index replication scheme reduces the data access cost of mobile clients in an energy efficient manner. We also discuss the relaxation of the given criteria. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.