The market penetration of mobile devices has experienced an impressive growth. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops have become both producers and consumers of user-generated contents. They also motivate novel communication paradigms such as the possibility to establish, in an opportunistic fashion, direct device-to-device links whenever two mobile nodes enter within the wireless range of each other. In this thesis, we consider the case of opportunistic dissemination of multiple large contents from an experimental point of view. This implies revisiting, among others, the common assumption that contacts have enough capacity to transfer any amount of data.In the first part of this thesis, we start from an Android implementation of EPICS, a network protocol designed for exchanging large contents in opportunistic networks, on off-the-shelf devices. After an deep analysis of application-level logs and captured wireless traces we found out limitations and uncovered improving possibilities. We then propose DAD, a new content dissemination protocol that adaptively sends bursts of data instead of the per-fragment transmission strategy of EPICS.The second part of this thesis deals with the scalability of legacy WLAN monitoring systems. We propose two original approaches. With the first one, based on trace similarity and community detection algorithms, we are able to identify how many monitor we need in a target area and where to place them. The second approach in based on collaborative measurements. In this case we face the risk of biased measures due attacks of malicious users generating adulterated traces. We then propose a method to detect such malicious behaviors.