Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are used in situations where networks need to be deployed immediately but no network infrastructure is available. If MANET nodes have sensing capabilities, they can capture and communicate the state of their surroundings, including environmental conditions or objects in their proximity. If the sensed state information is propagated to a database to build a consistent model of the real world, a variety of promising context aware applications becomes possible.

The models and concepts proposed in this dissertation can be applied to cooperatively maintain a model of the state of physical world objects on devices in MANETs. State information may be updated by independent observers either sequentially or concurrently. Applications that read the state of any object from the model multiple times can rely on the guarantee that every successive read operation will read either the same state information or newer state information that has been reported by an observer after the previously read information.

The first contribution of this dissertation formalizes these requirements and defines a novel consistency model called update-linearizability. Secondly, it introduces a new class of data replication algorithms that provably guarantees update-linearizability in MANETs without using synchronized clocks on any pair of nodes in the system. The presented algorithms allow executing read and write operations at any time, which provides high availability of data. These properties are even maintained in networks that are temporarily partitioned and where nodes are highly mobile. Finally the dissertation provides a proof that all replicas held in the system eventually converge towards the most recent state information of the physical world objects which they represent.