Addressing the Challenges of Reliable Data Transfer over Wireless and Mobile Networks Ph.D. thesis proposal

The vision of a broadly unified and pervasive communication paradigm where people can freely communicate with wide range of devices (cell phones, PDAs, laptops, palmtops etc.) using networks of wired and wireless links is gradually taking shape [4][5]. Whilst this is going to offer enormous flexibility to an end user in accessing data, it is also going to bringin several new challenges, yet unknown or obscure, left to be addressed for efficient and reliable data transfer. Applications that will run over a communication infrastructure composed of heterogeneous links (wired as well as wireless) will be susceptible to the vagaries of underlying network performance effects. This might be an outcome of the inexperience in the handling of a completely new network technology or integrating diverse network infrastructure while still re-using the ‘staple’ (Internet) protocols, never attuned for such networks. Manifestation of such link performance effects will result in severe degradation of the application performance, lowering the achievable Quality of Service (QoS) and essentially hindering information access or impeding data transfer to the end user.