Web Search From a Bus

Web Search From a Bus (2007)

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by Aruna Balasubramanian , Yun Zhou , Bruce Croft , Brian Neil Levine , Arun Venkataramani

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BibTeX

@MISC{Balasubramanian07websearch,
    author = {Aruna Balasubramanian and Yun Zhou and Bruce Croft and Brian Neil Levine and Arun Venkataramani},
    title = { Web Search From a Bus},
    year = {2007}
}

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Abstract

Opportunistic connections to the Internet from open wireless access points is now commonly possible in municipal areas. Vehicular networks can opportunistically connect to the internet for several seconds via open access points. In this paper, we adapt the interactive process of web search and retrieval to vehicular networks with intermittent Internet access. Our system, called Thedu has mobile nodes use an Internet proxy to collect search engine results and prefetch result pages. The mobiles nodes download the pre-fetched web pages from the proxy. Our contribution is a novel set of techniques to make aggressive but selective prefetching practical, resulting in a significantly greater number of relevant web results returned to mobile users. To evaluate our scheme, we deployed Thedu on DieselNet, our vehicular testbed of buses operating in a micro-urban area around Amherst, MA. Using a simulated workload, we find that users can expect four times as many useful responses to web search queries compared to not using Thedu. Moreover, the mean latency in receiving the first relevant response for a query is 2.7 minutes when deployed in a semi-urban region with a sparser distribution of APs compared to big cities.

Keyphrases

web search interactive process mobile user open wireless access point big city vehicular network micro-urban area mean latency vehicular testbed open access point intermittent internet access selective prefetching internet proxy semi-urban region search query municipal area novel set mobile node opportunistic connection simulated workload first relevant response search engine result many useful response pre-fetched web page relevant web result several second prefetch result page