Query Routing and Processing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Environments

Abstract

In existing mobile information access systems, mobile devices are typically viewed as consumers of information, with information providers resident on the wired network. With the advent of short-range ad-hoc connectivity based on Bluetooth like systems, an alternative scenario arises where mobile devices gather and exchange information from not just wired sources, but also their environment and one another. Each device is both a source and a consumer of information/data. In this paper we describe new challenges that this scenario presents to the distributed database framework, and present the design of a framework for serendipitous querying and query response in an ad-hoc mobile environment. We also describe an implementation of this system on mobile devices connected over Bluetooth networks, and present experimental results.