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A framework for modeling spatial node density in waypoint-based mobility

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Abstract

User mobility is of critical importance when designing mobile networks. In particular, "waypoint" mobility has been widely used as a simple way to describe how humans move. This paper introduces the first modeling framework to model waypoint-based mobility. The proposed framework is simple, yet general enough to model any waypoint-based mobility regimes. It employs first order ordinary differential equations to model the spatial density of participating nodes as a function of (1) the probability of moving between two locations within the geographic region under consideration, and (2) the rate at which nodes leave their current location. We validate our model against real user mobility recorded in GPS traces collected in three different scenarios. Moreover, we show that our modeling framework can be used to analyze the steady-state behavior of spatial node density resulting from a number of synthetic waypoint-based mobility regimes, including the widely used Random Waypoint model. Another contribution of the proposed framework is to show that using the well-known preferential attachment principle to model human mobility exhibits behavior similar to random mobility, where the original spatial node density distribution is not preserved. Finally, as an example application of our framework, we discuss using it to generate steady-state node density distributions to prime mobile network simulations.

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Notes

  1. The use of the term "homogeneous node distribution" refers here to the fact that there is no significant concentration of nodes (clusters), and should not be mistaken with uniform distribution normally used to model the choice of next destination, speed and pause time in random mobility models.

  2. A 90 % confidence level was computed. The confidence interval was too small to be seen in this scale and was omitted for clarity of the plot.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by NSF through Grant CCF 0916941 and by CAPES, Ministry of Education of Brazil, Caixa Postal 250, Brasilia—DF 70040-020 Brazil.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRIA Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée, 2004 Route des Lucioles, Valbonne, 06902, France

    Bruno Astuto Arouche Nunes

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, Baskin School of Engineering UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Katia Obraczka

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  1. Bruno Astuto Arouche Nunes
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  2. Katia Obraczka
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Correspondence to Bruno Astuto Arouche Nunes.

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Part of this work was done while Bruno was at UCSC

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Nunes, B.A.A., Obraczka, K. A framework for modeling spatial node density in waypoint-based mobility. Wireless Netw 20, 775–786 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-013-0639-0

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