in partial ful2llment of the requirements for the degree of

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.

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First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Prof. Jennifer E. Michaels. I am most appreciative of your guidance over the last four years, from the basics of elastic waves to both short- and long-term career advice. I have grown a tremendous amount, both profes-sionally and personally, and am deeply grateful for your mentorship, patience, and support. I would also like to thank my Ph.D. committee for their valuable insight and sugges-

degrading the primary systems. Yet in practice, monitoring the spectrum resources, detecting available resources for opportunistic communication, and transmit-ting over the resources are hard tasks. This thesis addresses the tasks of monitoring, de-

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 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 CraneTracker soft-ware system is presented. The system is shown effective through multiple proxy deploy-

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have become increasingly popular in the recent years, particularly in the form of online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These games support up to several ten thousand players interacting in a virtual game world. The current commercially successful games are client-server based, which is feasible for relatively slow role-playing games. Those have modest bandwidth and latency requirements and are paid for by their customers. For MMOGs with higher realtime requirements and/or a smaller number of customers willing to pay, peer-to-peer networking seems to be a serious alternative. This work analyzes the implementation of both a client-server and a peer-to-peer networking model for the prototype shooter game Planet π4. Initially, a survey introduces recent academic approaches to peer-to-peer systems specifically designed for games. Of those, one system is selected for implementation with Planet π4. Planet π4 is improved in several aspects for the purpose of analyzing various network implementations. First, its architecture is restructured and cleaned to allow for an easy replacement of the networking component. Second, its core is modified to work in a completely event-based mode, supporting the execution of the game in an discrete-event-based network simulator. Third, a simple artificial intelligence player is developed for workload generation in large (and possibly simulated) networks. Furthermore, the newly developed transport protocol CUSP is applied for the network implementation, thus the game is the first real application using CUSP. Finally the game Planet π4 is integrated with the CUSP network simulator, allowing to run the whole game in a simulated network without the need for modification of its core components. Kurzfassung Massen-Mehrspieler-Onlinespiele (Massively multiplayer online games; MMOGs) wurden in den vergangenen Jahren zunehmend populär, insbesondere in Form von Online-Rollenspielen (MMORPGs). In

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Hiermit versichere ich, die vorliegende Master-Thesis ohne Hilfe Dritter nur mit den an-gegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmitteln angefertigt zu haben. Alle Stellen, die aus Quellen entnommen wurden, sind als solche kenntlich gemacht. Diese Arbeit hat in gleicher oder ähnlicher Form noch keiner Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegen. Darmstadt, den 28th February 2014 (Denis Lapiner) This Master’s Thesis proposes and implements a game design for an Android based massively multiplayer online augmented reality game. The proposed game design is based on an analysis of other popular aug-mented reality games such as Ingress, a game created by Google Inc. The game of this thesis motivates the players to meet in the real world and move in groups to certain points of interest like historic mon-uments. The spatial locality of players, which comes up when players move in groups, makes the game interesting for the research on mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The provided implementation of the game contains a centralized communication component that logs the network communication between players and therefore, is usable for data collection of network traffic in MANETs. The collected data

IOS Press Utilization of intelligent agents for supporting citizens in their access to e-government services 1