| Recent advancement of mobile wireless devices has brought us abundant opportunities of mobile data sensing (ranging from conventional sensing using audio/image sensors, to discovery of local services such as gas prices) and distribution of sharable content to other mobile users. To support these applications, new brands of functions must be deployed such as distributed storage of sharable content, and epidemic distribution of content and indices. This thesis aims at developing protocols customized to such application needs, yet accounting for the interactions between the transport, network and physical layers. The contribution of the thesis is three-fold. First, we develop a two-tier data access protocol for proactive urban monitoring where the sensed data is kept on the vehicles and a distributed index is built to facilitate its access. Second, we design efficient content distribution protocols to mobile users, by considering radio characteristics and incorporating advanced techniques such as network coding, thereby considerably improving the performance. Third, we develop a scalable, delay tolerant multicast routing protocol and analyze its capacity/delay scaling behavior and the impacts of various design parameters such as buffer size. |
