Date of Award

5-31-2016

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Bo Sheng

Second Advisor

Xiaohui Liang

Third Advisor

Wei Ding

Abstract

Smartphone has become one of the most revolutionary devices in the history of computing. With various kinds of applications, the scope of smartphone has been significantly broadened in the past few years including almost every aspect in our daily life. However, due to the limited on-board resources such as CPU, storage, network bandwidth and battery power, smartphones and the mobile network serving them bring new challenges that have not been encountered in the traditional computing and networking environments.

This dissertation focuses on the research areas of improving the network architecture and enhancing the current applications on smartphones. It mainly investigates the areas in the following two directions for three representative categories of mobile services.

  • In the first direction, the dissertation aims to develop new communication models for smartphone Ad-Hoc networks to achieve efficient communication in the proximity. It is motivated by the fact that smartphone Ad-Hoc networks can help improve the current location-based services and propel new applications. Moreover, the new communication models provide complementary alternatives to the traditional infrastructure-based wireless networks.
  • In the second direction, the dissertation focuses on improving the other two categories of services, cloud storage services and real-time video streaming services for mobile devices. In the field of cloud storage, we introduce a cloud-assisted approach to provide a set of advanced file operations, such as encryption, decryption and compression, on smartphones. Furthermore, by utilizing the on-board Near Field Communication(NFC) module, we develop an algorithm to securely share the files between mobile devices. For the services of real-time video streaming, we propose approaches that identify a user’s status by analyzing the accelerometer data and then, dynamically adjust the buffer mechanism to save network bandwidth on smartphones.

The proposed communication models and enhanced applications have been intensively evaluated with both experiments and simulations. Compared to the prior work, this dissertation has identified a few important problems for the efficient communication on mobile devices and provided novel solutions to improve the performance.

Comments

Free and open access to this Campus Access Dissertation is made available to the UMass Boston community by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this dissertation through resources like Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global or through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a UMass Boston campus username and password and would like to download this work from off-campus, click on the "Off-Campus UMass Boston Users" link above.

Download
Off-Campus UMass Boston Users

Share

COinS