Rural Cafe

From CATER

A large majority of the world’s population in rural developing regions do not have access to the World Wide Web. Where traditional network connectivity technologies have proven to be prohibitively expensive, the emergence of new long-range wireless technologies (WiMax, GPRS, WiLDNet) and mechanical backhaul networks (using physical transportation links) provide hope for connecting these rural regions to the Internet. However, the network connectivity provided by these new solutions are by nature intermittent due to high network usage rates, frequent power-cuts and the use of delay tolerant links.

Typical applications, especially interactive applications such as web search, cannot work in the face of intermittent connectivity. RuralCafe is a system intended to support efficient web search over intermittent networks. RuralCafe makes three important contributions. First, RuralCafe enables users to perform web search asynchronously and find what they are looking for in one round of intermittency as opposed to multiple rounds of search/downloads. Second, RuralCafe supports an expanded search query interface which allows a user to specify additional query terms to maximize the utility of the results returned by a search query. Finally, given limited network resources, RuralCafe performs several optimizations to prefetch pages to best satisfy a user based on their search preferences. In addition, RuralCafe operates without requiring any changes to browser code. We have implemented and tested the effectiveness of RuralCafe over real-world search queries gathered from a large search engine.

People

Jay Chen
Lakshminarayanan Subramanian

Publications

• RuralCafe: Enhancing Web Search in Intermittent Networks. Jay Chen, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian and Jinyang Li. World Wide Web Conference (WWW)2009.