Snoogle: A Search Engine for the Physical World

Hardware advances will allow us to embed small devices into everyday objects such as toasters and coffee mugs, thus naturally form a wireless object network that connects the object with each other. This paper presents Snoogle, a search engine for such a network. Snoogle uses information retrieval techniques to index information and process user queries, and compression schemes such as Bloom filters to reduce communication overhead. Snoogle also considers security and privacy protections for sensitive data. We have implemented the system prototype on off-the-shelf sensor motes, and conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the system performance.