Although most of the daily scenarios of using wireless networking are clearly based on a type of infrastructure, such as an access point or a base station, there is a lot of interest for the wireless ad hoc networks.There is a bouquet of scenarios that require wireless connectivity and could not be supported without the wireless ad hoc networking.However, the efficient operation of the ad hoc networks is closely related to the problem of the efficient resource allocation.Resource allocation in the wireless ad hoc networks is a multi-challenging problem, with various open issues related to the routing, scheduling and rate adaptation subproblems.In this dissertation, we propose novel schemes that cope with these challenges, utilizing practices and ideas that originate from the Backpressure and Opportunistic Routing algorithms.We either mathematically prove that our schemes succeed an optimized performance, or we adopt heuristic approaches that are inspired from the aforementioned algorithms.The evaluation of the proposed schemes is based on experimentation using large scale wireless testbeds and extended software tools that adapt to our requirements.The capability for experimentation on these wireless testbeds is provided due to our work on extending the state-of-theart testbed framework.Our evaluation results are very promising, since we compare our algorithms with other well known schemes and we showcase significant improvements comparing to them.ix