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:

reliable, low-cost monitoring of migratory species. The developed multi-tier architecture yields ecologists with unconventional behavior in-formation not furnished by alternative tracking systems at such a large scale and for a low-cost. The simulation, development and implementation of the Crane

n Robots (and roboticists) increasingly appear

First, I would like to thank to Dimka Karastoyanova and Mariano Cilia for all the fruitful discussions, their guidance and support through the course of this project. Thanks also to Prof. Alejandro Buchmann who sponsored my stay at Technische Universität Darmstadt during the spring of 2004. The special thanks go to my advisor, Mariano Cilia, who has made all this possible. Finally, I’d like to thank to my family for all these years of support.

I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution.

As wireless sensor networks continue to grow in size, we are faced with the prospect of emerging wireless networks with hundreds or thousands of nodes. Geographic routing algorithms are a promising alternative to tradition ad hoc routing algorithms in this new domain for point-to-point routing

Messaging is a basic service in sensornets. Yet the unique system and application prop-erties of sensornets pose substantial challenges for the messaging design: Firstly, dynamic wireless links, constrained resources, and application diversity challenge the architecture and protocol design

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methodology that allows describing how significant the differences between testbeds actually are is needed. As a first step towards the definition of this methodology, we define several quantitative properties that can be used to describe and compare testbeds in a coherent manner. We show how a representative

Abstract: Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are two recently-developed technologies that uniquely function without xed infrastructure support, and sense at scales, resolutions, and durations previously not possible. While both offer great potential in many 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 in these networks, and (3) the extremely limited computational and energy resources available. Until now, the burden of handling these issues was put on the software application developer. This dissertation presents three novel programming models and middleware systems that address these challenges: Limone, Agilla, and Servilla. Limone reliably handles high levels of dynamics within MANETs. It does this through lightweight coordination primitives that make minimal assumptions about network connectivity. Agilla enables self-adaptive WSN applications via the integration of mobile agent and tuple space programming models, which is critical given the continuously changing network. It is the rst system to successfully demonstrate the feasibility of using mobile agents and tuple spaces within