ii iv vTo my parents vi vii Acknowledgements I would first and foremost extend my whole-hearted gratitude to my advisors, An-drea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. Andrea and Remzi are the reason that I had the opportunity for this exceptional Ph.D. journey. To this day, I still re-member the moment when they took me as their student and the joy and hope in my heart. Andrea and Remzi have showed me what systems research is like and how much fun and challenging it can be. Before this journey with them, I had always liked and believed in the beauty of mathematics and theory. My initial interest in systems research happened when I took Remzi’s Advanced Operating Systems

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April 29, 2011Für UnsShe had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it Lewis CarrollThe following document, written under the supervision of Dr. reviewed by:

This thesis presents CraneTracker, a multi-modal sensing and communication system for monitoring migratory species at the continental level. By exploiting the robust and extensive cellular infrastructure across the continent, traditional mobile wireless sensor networks can be extended to enable

group and of the IAM for our various interesting discussions about all kinds of topics and for making the institute a very pleasant and friendly place to work at. Special thanks go to David Steiner, Marc Steinemann, Matthias Scheidegger, Florian Baumgartner, Ruy De Oliveira, and Attila Weyland

in the existing user interfaces, remaining transparent to the user. The evaluation shows that our approach imposes almost no performance overhead for loaded application while keeping a smaller memory footprint than other comparable solutions. I.

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applications, developing software for these types of networks is extremely dffcult, preventing their wide-spread use. Three primary challenges are (1) the high level of dynamics within the network in terms of changing wireless links and node hardware con gurations, (2) the wide variety of hardware present

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of classical cryptanalytic advances or progress on the development of quantum computers the hardness of these closely related problems might be seriously weakened. A potential alternative approach is the construction of sig-nature schemes based on the hardness of certain lattices problems which are assumed