Opportunistic Communication and Human Mobility

Many mobility models currently used for evaluating wireless communication systems have weak resemblance to reality and there is a lack of understanding on which characteristics of human mobility affect system performance. In particular, most current mobility models assume a free flow of nodes and do not consider how mobility is affected by interactions with other persons and with the physical environment. They also assume a closed system, not considering the effect of node arrival and departure. The structure of space in which the mobility occurs is either not considered at all, or only in a limited way. In this work, we address human pedestrian mobility for evaluation of wireless communication to determine which of the aforementioned aspects need to be captured and to what level of detail. We focus on opportunistic communication in the form of ad-hoc and delay-tolerant networks. For the evaluation, we use mobility models from the field of transportation and urban planning that are used for designing and dimensioning public spaces for comfort and safety of pedestrians in rush hour and emergency evacuation. The models capture micro-mobility of pedestrians better than most mobility models used in mobile networking since the application domain requires realistic representation of node interactions with the physical environment and with other nodes. Our results show that the free flow assumption used in most models does not have a significant performance impact. We also conclude that performance is not very sensitive to accurate estimation of the probability distributions of mobility parameters such as speed and arrival process. Our results, however, suggest that it is important to capture the scenario and space in which mobility occurs since these may affect performance significantly.