SWIM: A Simple Model to Generate Small Mobile Worlds

TL;DR

SWIM is a simple, tunable mobility model that generates realistic synthetic traces for ad-hoc networks, accurately reflecting real-world contact patterns and predicting protocol performance.

Contribution

Introduces SWIM, a new mobility model that is easy to tune, generates realistic traces, and accurately predicts protocol performance in ad-hoc networks.

Findings

SWIM reproduces the power law and exponential decay in inter-contact times.

SWIM's synthetic traces match real-world statistical properties.

SWIM accurately predicts forwarding protocol performance.

Abstract

This paper presents small world in motion (SWIM), a new mobility model for ad-hoc networking. SWIM is relatively simple, is easily tuned by setting just a few parameters, and generates traces that look real--synthetic traces have the same statistical properties of real traces. SWIM shows experimentally and theoretically the presence of the power law and exponential decay dichotomy of inter-contact time, and, most importantly, our experiments show that it can predict very accurately the performance of forwarding protocols.