Snoogle: A Search Engine for Pervasive Environments

Abstract

Embedding small devices into everyday objects like toasters and coffee mugs creates a wireless network of objects. These embedded devices can contain a description of the underlying objects, or other user defined information. In this paper, we present Snoogle, a search engine for such a network. A user can query Snoogle to find a particular mobile object, or a list of objects that fit the description. Snoogle uses information retrieval techniques to index information and process user queries, and Bloom filters to reduce communication overhead. Security and privacy protections are also engineered into Snoogle to protect sensitive information. We have implemented a prototype of Snoogle using off-the-shelf sensor motes, and conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the system performance.