Publishing in wireless and wireline environments

Publishing is a spontaneous and periodic broadcasting of information by a server. This dissertation shows how publishing can be efficiently used in both low bandwidth wireless networks and high bandwidth wireline networks. The first part of this dissertation deals with publishing in wireless networks. The solutions that we propose for wireless environments are motivated by the two most important resource constraints in such environments: limited power at the clients and scarce network bandwidth. In a wireless environment it is crucial for the server to publish a directory along with the data. This enables battery powered clients to selectively download only relevant pieces of data, thereby saving significant power. However, publishing a directory leaves less bandwidth for the data itself. Thus, there is a need for efficient multiplexing of the directory along with the data in order to remove as little bandwidth as possible and simultaneously offer efficient solutions for power conservation at the clients. Such techniques are provided in this dissertation for both primary and secondary indexes. In addition, we also provide some hashing based solutions. This dissertation analytically demonstrates that the proposed techniques result in power and bandwidth conservation. Further on, we propose techniques for adaptive publishing when data items are accessed with different frequencies. Finally, we propose a general architecture for future wireless information systems. In wireline networks we focus on efficient utilization of network bandwidth. This dissertation proposes a new technique for providing key multimedia services like the Video On Demand service. It also provides analytical results demonstrating the benefits of this technique along with an implementation of its prototype on Ethernet scLAN.