Understanding the interaction between reliability and wireless broadcast

With advancement in communication technologies, the design of efficient and lightweight reliability protocols seems like an achievable goal. However, strategies for attacking and compromising communication reliability have also seen comparable advancement. As a result, reliability still remains a key concern for both the wired and wireless communication networks of today. In this dissertation, we seek to understand the fundamental characteristics of the problem of reliable communication. We develop algorithms for reliable communication between a fault-free source-destination pair and design Byzantine fault tolerance protocols based on the proposed algorithms. In view of the fact that wireless networks have become an integral part of communication networks, reliability concerns arise when these networks are used by applications possibly carrying mission critical or highly classified information. We provide an extensive study of the interaction between reliability and wireless broadcast. We discuss examples of real networks where wireless broadcast may both be a problem as well as a solution. We study the implications of using wireless watchdogs for reliability with TCP traffic. We identify the factors responsible for degrading throughput of TCP when used in combination with watchdogs and address those. We also provide another use-case for wireless watchdogs in the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) networks that have gained popularity recently. We then study the source location problem where the broadcast nature of the wireless medium is the underlying cause of a breach in location privacy. We propose and evaluate several solutions for the problem.