creator Xu, Xiaohua advisor Li, Xiang-Yang The limited energy resources, instability, and lacking central control in wireless networks motivates the study of connected dominating set (CDS) which serves as rout- ing backbone to support service discovery, and area monitoring and also broadcasting. The construction of CDS involves both coverage and connectivity. We ¯rst study sev- eral problems related to coverage. Given are a set of nodes and targets in a plane, the problem Minimum Wireless Cover (MWC) seeks the fewest nodes to cover the targets. If all nodes are associated with some positive prices, the problem Cheapest Wireless Cover (CWC) seeks a cheapest set of nodes to cover the targets. If all nodes have bounded lives, the problem Max-Life Wireless Cover (MLWC) seeks wireless coverage schedule of maximum life subject to the life constraints of individ- ual nodes. We present a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for MWC, and two randomized approximation algorithms for CWC and MLWC respectively. Given a node-weighted graph, the problem Minimum-Weighted Dominating Set (MWDS) is to ¯nd a minimum-weighted vertex subset such that, for any vertex, it is contained in this subset or it has a neighbor contained in this set. We will propose a (4+²)-approximation algorithm for MWDS in unit disk graphs. Meanwhile, for the connecting part, given a node-weighted connected graph and a subset of terminals, the problem Node-Weighted Steiner Tree (NWST) seeks a lightest tree connecting a given set of terminals in a node-weighted graph. We present three approximation algorithms for NWST restricted to UDGs. This dissertation also explores the applications of CDS, and develops e±cient algorithms for the applications such as real-time aggregation scheduling in wireless networks. Given a set of periodic aggregation queries, each query has its own period , and the subset of source nodes Si containing the data, we ¯rst propose a family of e±cient and e®ective real-time scheduling protocols that can answer every job of each query task within a relative delay under resource constraints by addressing the following tightly coupled tasks: routing, transmission plan constructions, node activity scheduling, and packet scheduling. Based on our protocol design, we further propose schedulability test schemes to e±ciently and e®ectively test whether, for a set of queries, each query job can be ¯nished within a ¯nite delay. We also conduct extensive simulations to validate the proposed protocol and evaluate its practical performance. The simulations corroborate our theoretical analysis. Submitted by Dana Lamparello (dlampare@iit.edu) on 2012-08-27T20:37:18Z No. of bitstreams: 2 thesis.pdf: 597103 bytes, checksum: 42f3302ce34b744de8a36b45d0f85209 (MD5) signed title page.pdf: 181251 bytes, checksum: 646cadf0ca84c5d9f323640ea11e0269 (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2012-08-27T20:37:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 thesis.pdf: 597103 bytes, checksum: 42f3302ce34b744de8a36b45d0f85209 (MD5) signed title page.pdf: 181251 bytes, checksum: 646cadf0ca84c5d9f323640ea11e0269 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-05 Ph.D. in Computer Science, May 2012 2012-04-25 2012-05 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/2861 en Dissertation born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access CS / Computer Science Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department