In the last years indoor localization and applications that use positioning information have attracted a lot of attention from the...

Visible Light Communication(VLC) has emerged in the last years as a new way to communicate. Using the existing lighting infrastructure,...

By leveraging on novel concepts of virtualization and programmability, future 5G Net- works are expected to be reliable, high-performing and...

As the Internet is becoming a fundamental aspect of the society serving as a de facto platform for social and...

Context-awareness is a peculiar characteristic of an expanding set of applications that make use of a combination of restricted spatio-temporal locality and mobile communications, to deliver a variety of services. Opportunistic communications satisfy well the communication requirements of these applications, because they naturally incorporate context.

The current Internet includes a large number of distributed services. In order to guarantee the QoS of the communication in these services, a client has to select a close-by server with enough available resources. In order to achieve this objective, in this Thesis, we propose a simple and practical solution for Dynamic and Location Aware Server Discovery based on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). Specifically, we decide to use a Chord DHT system (although any other DHT scheme can be used). In more detail, the solution works as follows. The servers offering a given service form a Chord-like DHT. In addition, they register their location (topological and/or geographical) information in the DHT. Each client using the service is connected to at least one server from the DHT. Eventually, a given client realizes that it is connected to a server providing a bad QoS, then, it queries the DHT in order to find an appropriate server (i.e. a close-by server with enough available resources). We define 11 design criteria, and compare our solution to the State of the Art based on them. We show that our solution is the most complete one. Furthermore, we validate the performance of our solution in two different scenarios: NAT Traversal Server Discovery and Home Agent Discovery in Mobile IP scenarios. The former serves to validate our solution in a highly dynamic environment whereas the latter demonstrates the appropriateness of our solution in more classical environments where the servers are typically hosts.

The design, standardization and future deployment of vehicular communications systems have been driven so far by safety applications. There are two more aspects of the vehicular networking that have increased their importance in the last years: Infotainment and traffic efficiency, as they can improve drivers' experience, making vehicular communications systems more attractive to end-users.

The media access control (MAC) layer of the IEEE 802.11 standard specifies a set of parameters that regulate the behavior of the wireless stations when accessing the channel. Although the standard defines a set of recommended values for these parameters, they are statically set and do not take into account the current conditions in the wireless local area network (WLAN) in terms of, e.g., number of contending stations and the traffic they generate, which results in suboptimal performance

BitTorrent is the most successful Peer-to-Peer (P2P) application and is responsible for a major portion of Internet traffic. It has been largely studied using simulations, models and real measurements. Although simulations and modelling are easier to perform, they typically simplify analysed problems and in case of BitTorrent they are likely to miss some of the effects which occur in real swarms.

The performance of the global routing system is vital to thousands of entities operating the Autonomous Systems (ASes) which make up the Internet. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is currently responsible for the exchange of reachability information and the selection of paths according to their specified routing policies.