The influence mobility model: a novel hierarchical mobility modeling framework

Practical mobile ad hoc systems include heterogeneous classes of mobile nodes, such as people and vehicles. The simultaneous presence and movement of these classes influence the mobility pattern of their members in a variety of random and deterministic ways. In addition, there is an inherent hierarchical and multi-resolution structure to the mobility patterns. We present a novel hierarchical mobility framework which incorporates the fact that the movement of certain classes of mobile nodes (e.g., people) is affected by their surroundings and the movement of other forms of mobile nodes. The proposed model takes into account that a mobile node's movement is neither completely random, nor a mere function of its routing decision and/or the trip's source and destination points. The proposed model is neither classified as microscopic nor macroscopic. Instead, it is categorized as a multi-scale mobility framework capable of modeling mobility scenarios of different scales, i.e. it is equally capable of modeling the movement of mobile nodes in a street intersection as it is to model the movement of nodes between a number of population centers. The proposed mobility framework integrates and extends an influence model and hierarchical graph-based representations of the mobility area to achieve this goal. Our simulation results show that this framework accurately captures the influences among different groups of mobile nodes and the constraints imposed by their surroundings.