Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Web Search From A Bus, Aruna Balasubramanian, Yun Zhou, Bruce Croft, Brian Neil Levine, Arun Venkataramani

Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series

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 …