The Sociable Traveller: Human Travelling Patterns inSocial-Based Mobility

摘要

Understanding how humans move is a key factor for the de-sign and evaluation of networking protocols and mobility management solutions in mobile networks. This is particu-larly true for mobile scenarios in which conventional single-hop access to the infrastructure is not always possible, and multi-hop wireless forwarding is a must. We specifically fo-cus on one of the most recent mobile networking paradigms, i.e., opportunistic networks. In this paradigm the commu-nication takes place directly between the personal devices (e.g., smartphones and PDAs) that the users carry with them during their daily activities, without any assumption about pre-existing infrastructures. Among all mobility char-acteristics that may affect the performance of opportunistic networks, the users' travelling patterns have recently gained a lot of attention due to their impact on the spreading of both viruses and messages in such a network. In this paper we consider a social-based mobility model (HCMM) and we extend this model to account for the typical travelling be-haviour of users. To the best of our knowledge, the resulting mobility model is the first model in which movements driven by social relations also match statistical features of travel-ling patterns as measured in reality. Finally, we evaluate our proposal through simulations over a wide range of scenar-ios, emphasizing the effect of finite sampling on the obtained results.