On the Impact of Geographic Restrictions on Contact Metrics in Opportunistic Networks

Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMNs) are continuously facing a load increase. One way to cope with this situation is Data-Offloading. To realize offloading, e.g., via implementing solutions researched in the opportunistic networking domain, the performance of these solutions has to be evaluated. As scalability is crucial, simulation is the method of choice. In typical performance evaluations, only simple simulation models are used. Thus, relevance and trust of the results are often unclear. This paper combines three dimensions of simulation model types to estimate the impact on the performance evaluation of opportunistic networks. We examine the impact on contact metrics of human mobility as well as geographic restrictions in movement and signal propagation modeling. Our results show that (1) both categories of movement modeling have a significant influence on contact metrics and (2) geographic restrictions need to be considered in both movement and signal propagation only for higher signal propagation ranges.