Scale-Free Properties of Human Mobility and Applications to Intelligent Transportation Systems

Characterizing and modeling node mobility is of critical importance in building intelligent transportation systems and their applications. In this paper, we discuss the scale-free properties of some important human mobility characteristics, namely spatial node density and mobility degree, and show that they exhibit behavior that can be described by a power-law. Based on their power-law characteristics, we derive analytical models for the spatial node density and mobility degree and show that the data generated by the proposed analytical models closely approach the empirical data extracted from the real mobility traces. Another contribution of our work is to use the proposed analytical models to build a synthetic mobility regime that is suitable for simulations of intelligent transportation systems. Finally, through network simulations, we show that the ad-hoc network routing behavior under our mobility regime closely approximates routing behavior when the corresponding real trace is used.