Personal content networking among mobile users

People today carry various electronic mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and netbooks; with those devices they produce a staggering amount of personal content including photos, videos, and voice recordings. Personal content is created not only by these mobile devices, but also by wearable embedded sensors for medical or environmental monitoring. These sensors are wirelessly connected to mobile devices and transmit sensor data using a Personal Area Networking (PAN) technology like Bluetooth. These personal digital devices with "contents" have brought forth a new opportunity for personal content networking, enabling the distribution of sharable contents and sharing of selective contents with other mobile users. This thesis develops the protocols that make personal content networking possible. The main contribution of this thesis is three-fold. First, we design and implement cooperative content distribution protocols to the mobile users by considering wireless device characteristics to improve its performance. Second, we develop a secure selective content sharing system based upon content centric networking (CCN). Third, we propose situation-awareness and content sharing based on PlaceWalker, a system which learns and matches the places where the user visits.