Does mobility matter?

In modern society, wireless devices are commonly carried by humans. The wireless communication is therefore affected by pedestrian mobility in urban outdoor and indoor spaces which is the scenario we consider in this work. Many of the mobility models currently used for evaluating wireless communication systems have poor resemblance to reality. Although advances have recently been made, there is still a lack of understanding on which elements of mobility affect system performance. In the civil-engineering field of transport and urban planning there exist advanced pedestrian mobility models, used for designing and dimensioning public spaces for pedestrian crowds and emergency evacuation. These models capture micro-mobility of pedestrians better than most mobility models used in mobile networking since the application domain requires that they realistically capture node interactions with its physical environment as well as other nodes. In this work we use Legion Studio, a commercial simulator, to explore which elements of pedestrian mobility are important with respect to system performance and how sensitive the connectivity metrics of nodes are to input mobility parameters. These studies give insight into whether relatively simple mobility models suffice for evaluating wireless systems. Furthermore, they contribute to our understanding of which parameters are important for modelling mobility and the accuracy in which these parameters need to be estimated to give dependable results.