With recent advances in Web 2.0 technologies and the insatiable desire of people to share information, we are currently observing a paradigm shift in the way electronic content is created and consumed. Whereas published news, photographs, audio programs or movies have traditionally been produced by a small group of professionals and consumed by a large audience, technology today allows more and more content to be provided by the mobile users themselves, for a broad community of people with common interests. This user-generated content is provided today in the Internet in the form of podcasts, blogs, or social platforms such as Flickr, YouTube, or Facebook.

In PodNet, we envision a seamless content distribution model that decouples the sharing from traditional Internet based platforms. PodNet relies on a virtual fleet of mobile users interacting socially and cooperating in order to distribute content in a peer-to-peer fashion over opportunistic contacts between wireless devices carried by users. Transfer opportunities typically arise when people with matching interests meet such as in public transportations, at parties or urban areas in general. The resulting mobile content distribution model may reduce the time to obtain new content when on the move but also provides totally new opportunities to interact socially and share content with people having similar interests in content.

Our goal in the PodNet project is twofold. We are developing the system software and protocols to enable efficient wireless ad hoc content distribution on mobile devices. At the same time, we are interested at understanding the social behavior of users and their mobility patterns while using such a system. We expect to gain new insights by launching measurements campaigns in controlled environments with the developed PodNet system.

Recently, we have developed PodNetSec a secure version of PodNet preventing the dissemination of spam and illegal content.