Due to its ability to deliver scalable and fault-tolerant solutions, applications based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm are used by millions of users on the internet. Recently, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted a lot of interest from both academia and industry, because of their potential to provide flexible and alternative broadband wireless internet connectivity. However, due to various reasons such as unstable wireless link characteristics and multi-hop forwarding operation, the performance of current P2P systems is rather low in WMNs.

This dissertation studies the technological challenges involved while deploying P2P systems over WMNs. We study the benefits of location-awareness and resource replication to the P2P overlay while targeting efficient resource lookup in WMNs. We further propose a cross-layer information exchange between the P2P overlay and the WMN in order to reduce resource lookup delay by augmenting the overlay routing table with physical neighborhood and resource lookup history information.

Aiming to achieve throughput maximization and fairness in P2P systems, we model the peer selection problem as a mathematical optimization problem by using a set of mixed integer linear equations. A study of the model reveals the relationship between peer selection, resource replication and channel assignment on the performance of P2P systems over WMNs. We extend the model by formulating the P2P download problem as chunk scheduling problem. As a novelty, we introduce constraints to model the capacity limitations of the network due to the given routing and channel assignment strategy. Based on the analysis of the model, we propose a new peer selection algorithm which incorporates network load information and multi-path routing capability.

By conducting testbed experiments, we evaluate the achievable throughput in multi-channel multi-radio WMNs. We show that the adjacent channel interference (ACI) problem in multi-radio systems can be mitigated, making better use of the available spectrum. Important lessons learned are also outlined in order to design practical channel and channel bandwidth assignment algorithms in multi-channel multi-radio WMNs.