Human mobility model for simulation modeling of wireless delay tolerant networks

In the article a human mobility model is presented. The model is designed to simulate delay tolerant networks where network nodes are people-portable devices with a small effective radius of the built-in transceiver. The base principle of this network is “Store-Carry-Forward”. The model reflects the features of real mobility that are important for the performance of these networks, such as the Levy’s probability distribution for transition lengths and waypoints clustering. The main characteristic of real mobility, that is used to verify the adequacy of the model, is the distribution of the time between contacts (the presence of an active communication channel) of an arbitrary pair of network nodes, i.e. the inter-contact time. In comparison with the best-known mobility models for delay tolerant networks, the proposed model requires less initialization information about the simulated situation while offering a sufficiently good approximation of the inter-contact time. The article presents the results of proposed model comparison with similar models and with real mobility data.