A middleware approach to information dissemination in heterogeneous wireless networks

Dissemination of application-generated content data (e.g., text, images, audio, video, etc.) over wireless networks is an important and useful primitive in a number of applications across various domains (ranging from emergency response, to mobile social networking). In many scenarios, the direct connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi ad hoc, Bluetooth) between mobile nodes potentially serves as a complement or alternative to infrastructure-based connectivity (e.g., cellular data networks, Wi-Fi hotspots) for supporting dissemination services. This leads to research challenges posed by factors such as (a) the heterogeneity of the connectivity between mobile nodes, (b) the diverse spatial, temporal and social relevance of the disseminated data, and (c) the varying needs of dissemination applications (in terms of reliability, timeliness and efficiency, etc.). However, these challenges have not been sufficiently addressed by existing work.;In this thesis, we systematically study information dissemination in wireless networks. The goal is to develop easily deployable solutions to reliable, fast and efficient dissemination of content data over heterogeneous networking environments. We take a middleware approach that is resilient to the heterogeneity of networks and offers adaptive services to applications with varying needs. We look into the multiple aspects of wireless information dissemination, and devise mechanisms to particularly address the following issues: (i) providing reliability guarantees for instant dissemination in connected ad hoc networks, (ii) enabling delay-tolerant dissemination of location-relevant information to mobile recipients with specific spatial attributes over intermittently disconnected networks, and (iii) facilitating dissemination to a larger pool of recipients located over larger geographies by exploiting both direct device-to-device connectivity and temporary (or possibly overloaded) infrastructure-based connectivity. Through extensive simulation-based experiments, we assess the performance of our solutions and demonstrate their merits (compared against existing techniques). Moreover, we design and implement a middleware suite on real mobile devices, that incorporates our solutions and showcases their efficacy. Further, we build prototype applications with social networking flavors using the services offered by the middleware; these applications demonstrate the utility of the middleware, as well as the broad scope of our work.