| Summary: | We consider the problem of content sharing and distribution in a wireless mesh community network (WMCN). Due to the community oriented nature of such networks, and with the evolution of advanced mobile computing devices; it is projected that the demand for content sharing and distribution in wireless community networks will dramatically increase in the coming years. A popular scheme for content sharing and distribution is through the use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology. This dissertation studies the technical challenges involved while deploying P2P applications over WMCNs. We advance the thesis that support from a number of infrastructure nodes in a wireless community network to P2P applications running on top of the wireless community network such as P2P content sharing and P2P media streaming, results in significant performance enhancement. Such support from infrastructure nodes benefits from awareness of the underlying network topology (i.e., information available at relay nodes about the true physical connections between nodes in the network). Cross-layer information exchange between the P2P system and the WMCN opens the door to developing efficient algorithms and schemes for P2P communications that account for the specific features of WMCNs (e.g., contention for wireless medium between neighboring nodes and traffic interference). Moreover, such support benefits from the underutilized resources (e.g., storage and bandwidth resources) at a large number of infrastructure nodes in the WMCN. This creates the possibility of replicating into the caches of those under-utilized infrastructure nodes P2P contents that are desired by the community, and enabling those infrastructure nodes to participate in content distribution and play the role of helpers in P2P content sharing and distribution. Our main contribution in this dissertation is P2P-with-helpers: Hybrid approaches for content sharing and distribution in a wireless community network that rely on support from infrastructure nodes to the P2P applications. We show that P2P-with-helpers approaches signi cantly enhance the performance of P2P content sharing and distribution in WMCNs. The performance enhancements reflect aspects such as average content download times, bandwidth and energy consumption in the network, Internet bandwidth cost, and traffic load imbalance in the network.
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