T-Sorokin: A General Mobility Model in Opportunistic Networks

The opportunistic networks are a kind of ad hoc networks that rely on the chance of nodes meeting to transmit messages. Acting as an effective supplement to 4G and 5G networks in some special scenarios where hardware devices are limited, the opportunistic networks have a significant application in health monitoring, warning broadcasting, disaster relief, and so on. The mobility model is one of the research focuses on the opportunistic networks. On the basis of the social mobility theory proposed by Sorokin, a general mobility model, which is suited for various scenarios, called T-Sorokin is proposed. This model is described as a seven-tuple and implemented on the Opportunistic Network Environment simulator and fits both Infocom06 and Rome taxi data set, which includes different areas ranging from hotel to city and different mobile units ranging from person to taxi. The results of experiments demonstrate that the T-Sorokin model has the advantage of generality, simplicity, and accuracy. It can simply establish movement tracks close to real data under different scenarios.