Modeling Spatial and Temporal Dependencies of User Mobility in Wireless Mobile Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces the TVC mobility model that captures realistic spatial and temporal user behaviors in wireless networks, enabling better protocol evaluation and design.

Contribution

The paper proposes the TVC model, a novel, realistic, and tractable mobility model capturing spatial-temporal correlations and re-appearances in user mobility.

Findings

TVC model accurately replicates diverse mobility trace characteristics.

The model allows derivation of key protocol performance metrics.

TVC's realism and tractability support improved protocol design.

Abstract

Realistic mobility models are fundamental to evaluate the performance of protocols in mobile ad hoc networks. Unfortunately, there are no mobility models that capture the non-homogeneous behaviors in both space and time commonly found in reality, while at the same time being easy to use and analyze. Motivated by this, we propose a time-variant community mobility model, referred to as the TVC model, which realistically captures spatial and temporal correlations. We devise the communities that lead to skewed location visiting preferences, and time periods that allow us to model time dependent behaviors and periodic re-appearances of nodes at specific locations. To demonstrate the power and flexibility of the TVC model, we use it to generate synthetic traces that match the characteristics of a number of qualitatively different mobility traces, including wireless LAN traces, vehicular mobility traces, and human encounter traces. More importantly, we show that, despite the high level of realism achieved, our TVC model is still theoretically tractable. To establish this, we derive a number of important quantities related to protocol performance, such as the average node degree, the hitting time, and the meeting time, and provide examples of how to utilize this theory to guide design decisions in routing protocols.