Aggregated Boolean Query Processing for Document Retrieval in Edge Computing

Abstract

Search engines use significant hardware and energy resources to process billions of user queries per day, where Boolean query processing for document retrieval is an essential ingredient. Considering the huge number of users and large scale of the network, traditional query processing mechanisms may not be applicable since they mostly depend on a centralized retrieval method. To remedy this issue, this paper proposes a processing technique for aggregated Boolean queries in the context of edge computing, where each sub-region of the network corresponds to an edge network regulated by an edge server, and the Boolean queries are evaluated in a distributed fashion on the edge servers. This decentralized query processing technique has demonstrated its efficiency and applicability for the document retrieval problem. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that this technique achieves high query performance and outperforms the traditional centralized methods by 2–3 times.