The rapid growth of wireless mobile devices has led to saturation and congestion of wireless channels – a well-known fact. In the recent years, this issue is further exacerbated by the ever- increasing demand for traffic intensed multimedia content applications, which include but are not limited to social media, news and video streaming applications. Therefore the development of highly efficient content distribution technologies is of utmost importance, specifically to cope with the scarcity and the high cost of wireless resources. To this aim, this thesis investigates the challenges and the considerations required to design efficient techniques to improve the performance of wireless networks. Since wireless signals are prone to fluctuations and mobile users are, with high likelihood, have difference channel qualities, we particularly focus on the scenarios with heterogeneous user distribution. Further, this dissertation considers two main techniques to cope with mobile users demand and the limitation of wireless resources. Firstly, we propose an opportunistic multicast scheduling to efficiently distribute or disseminate data to all users with low delay. Secondly, we exploit the Millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) frequency band that has a high potential of meeting the high bandwidth demand. In particular, we propose a channel access mechanism and a scheduling algorithm that take into account the limitation of the high frequency band (i.e., high path loss).

Keywords: Algorithm Design, MAC Layer, Scheduling Protocol, Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

About Sim Gek Hong

Sim Gek received her Bachelor Degree (Engineering majoring in Telecommunication) and first Master Degree (Engineering Science) from Multimedia University, Malaysia in 2007 and 2011, respectively. She was a technical trainer in Huawei Technologies, Co., Ltd for a few months before she joined Imdea Networks in 2011 as a research assistant and soon obtained her second Master Degree in Telematics Engineering from University Carlos III Madrid in 2012.

Personal website at IMDEA Networks

The thesis defense will be conducted in English

PhD Thesis Advisor: Prof. Dr. Joerg Widmer, IMDEA Networks Institute