Overlay routing has emerged as a promising approach to improving performance and reliability of Internet paths. To fully realize the potential of overlay routing under the constraints of deployment costs in terms of hardware, network connectivity and human effort, it is critical to carefully place infrastructure overlay nodes to balance the trade-off between performance and resource constraints. In this paper, we investigate approaches to perform intelligent placement of overlay nodes to facilitate (i) resilient routing and (ii) TCP performance improvement. We formulate objective functions to accurately capture application behavior: reliability and TCP performance, and develop several placement algorithms, which offer a wide range of trade-offs in complexity and required knowledge of the client- server location and traffic load. Using simulations on synthetic and real Internet topologies, and PlanetLab experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the placement algorithms and objective functions developed, respectively. We conclude that an approach, hybrid of random and greedy approaches, provides the best tradeoff between computational efficiency and accuracy. We also uncover the fundamental challenge in simultaneously optimizing for reliability and TCP performance, and propose a simple unified algorithm to achieve the same.

The stationary nature of nodes in a mesh network has shifted the main design goal of routing protocols from maintaining connectivity between source and destination nodes to finding high-throughput paths between them. In recent years, numerous link-quality-based routing metrics have been proposed for choosing high-throughput paths for unicast protocols. In this paper we study routing metrics for high-throughput tree or mesh construction in multicast protocols. We show that there is a fundamental difference between unicast and multicast routing in how data packets are transmitted at the link layer, and accordingly there is a difference in how the routing metrics for each of these primitives are designed. We adapt certain routing metrics for unicast for high-throughput multicast routing and propose news ones not previously used for high-throughput. We then study the performance improvement achieved by using different link-quality-based routing metrics via extensive simulation and experiments on a mesh network testbed, using ODMRP as a representative multicast protocol. Our testbed experiment results show that ODMRP enhanced with linkquality routing metrics can achieve up to 17.5% throughput improvement as compared to the original ODMRP.

The nature of digital content is undergoing a radical transformation due to the growing infusion of user-generated content. Users that generate content have a strong motivation to actively promote their content in order to achieve publicity, recognition or to simply spread their viewpoints, knowledge and creations. Existing content sharing mechanisms available to such users, such as in P2P file sharing, are pull-based, relegating the user to a passive role. To enable active participation from users, we propose Promoter, a framework that enhances P2P file sharing systems to support content promotion in addition to the available pull-based content search. Promotion is enabled by publicizing a user's content to peers and disseminating the content by incentivizing peers to download and further propagate it.

Energy-efficient broadcast communication is an important problem in wireless ad hoc networks. Previously, minimum-energy broadcast that exploits the broadcast nature of radio transmission has been studied and shown to be NP-complete for omnidirectional antennas. In this paper, we investigate the minimum-energy broadcast problem under a wide spectrum of directional antenna models, including sectored antennas with fixed sectors and beamwidth and antenna array-based smart antennas with varying degrees of beam orientation and beamwidth. We first propose the RF design and implementation of each model, which suggests the practical parameters of antennas under that model. We then show that the minimum-energy broadcast problem under each of the antenna models is NP-complete. Lastly, we present a heuristic algorithm based on BIP for the above problem under each directional antenna model and experimentally compare the energy efficiency of using different directional antennas using these heuristics. Our results show that using antennas with adjustable orientation and variable beamwidth gives the best results. For such antennas, the scanning angle is the dominant factor in improving the quality of the broadcast trees. The number of antennas per node is not that critical to obtaining a better broadcast tree as long as it is large enough to cover the entire 360◦ around a node so as to prevent network partitioning.