With the rise of cloud computing, data centers have been called to play a main role in the Internet scenario nowadays. Despite this relevance, they are probably far from their zenith yet due to the ever increasing demand of contents to be stored in and distributed by the cloud, the need of computing power or the larger and larger amounts of data being analyzed by top companies such as Google, Microsoft or Amazon.

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 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.

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 goal of the thesis is to resolve distributed computing bottlenecks arising from continuously increasing amount of incoming data and from...

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks are one of the main key components in next cellular and WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks). mmWave...

Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology is one of the main pillars of the next generation Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and...

The Electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is well regulated by frequency assignment authorities, national regulatory agencies and the International Communication Union (ITU)....

The infrastructure of current 4G mobile networks is being challenged by new data-hungry and latency-sensitive services appearing every day. To...

The consumption of multimedia content is moving from a residential environment to mobile phones. Mobile data traffic, driven mostly by video...