The research presented in this document centers on the management of mobile distributed systems, and in particular, on emerging wireless local area networks and the possibilities they offer for new applications. In contrast to cellular wireless networks, with their technical complexity and expensive deployment overhead, local area wireless networks can be installed very simply, without the need for existing infrastructure. Wireless local-area networks permit laptops and mobile phones that are in close proximity to spontaneously exchange information. In this document, systems programming techniques are presented to facilitate the development of applications that exploit the proximity of devices, and that notably handle the inherent network volatility. The themes presented in the document are then extended to other types of mobile network, notably to discontinued coverage networks. These are wireless networks with the particularity that user devices do not exchange information directly, but rather via base stations that integrate radio receivers and transmitters. Base stations can be easily deployed, thus facilitating a scalable and highly dynamic network. The systems programming techniques presented in this part of the docu- ment are aimed at rendering communication breakages transparent using caching techniques that manage the up-flow (device to base station) and down-flow (base station to device) of application data. The final part of this document looks at the merging two types of heterogeneous and wireless networks. The merging of these type of networks, on a technical level, presents immense possibilities for incorporating a large number of users in a wireless infrastructure at low cost. The work presented in this final part concludes with the presentation of a series of systems programming mechanisms for integrating the two kinds of network.
