GRM: Group Regularity Mobility Model

TL;DR

GRM is a new human mobility model that captures group meeting regularity and social structures, improving the realism of synthetic contact traces for evaluating social-aware protocols.

Contribution

The paper introduces GRM, a mobility model that incorporates group meeting dynamics and regularity, filling gaps in existing models.

Findings

GRM reproduces contact duration and inter-contact time distributions of real traces.

GRM captures group meeting regularity and social community structures.

Social-aware protocols behave similarly in GRM-generated traces and real data.

Abstract

In this work we propose, implement, and evaluate GRM, a novel mobility model that accounts for the role of group meeting dynamics and regularity in human mobility. Specifically, we show that existing mobility models for humans do not capture the regularity of human group meetings which is present in real mobility traces. Next, we characterize the statistical properties of such group meetings in real mobility traces and design GRM accordingly. We show that GRM maintains the typical pairwise contact properties of real traces, such as contact duration and inter-contact time distributions. In addition, GRM accounts for the role of group mobility, presenting group meetings regularity and social communities' structure. Finally, we evaluate state-of-art social-aware protocols for opportunistic routing using a synthetic contact trace generated by our model. The results show that the behavior of such protocols in our model is similar to their behavior in real mobility traces.