STEPS - an approach for human mobility modeling
NETWORKING'11 Proceedings of the 10th international IFIP TC 6 conference on Networking - Volume Part I
Research challenges towards the Future Internet
Computer Communications
Modelling inter-contact times in social pervasive networks
Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems
Proceedings of the third ACM international workshop on Mobile Opportunistic Networks
Analysing delay-tolerant networks with correlated mobility
ADHOC-NOW'12 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Ad-hoc, Mobile, and Wireless Networks
Ego network models for Future Internet social networking environments
Computer Communications
The impact of spatial resolution and representation on human mobility predictability
W2GIS'13 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Web and Wireless Geographical Information Systems
Extrapolating sparse large-scale GPS traces for contact evaluation
Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on HotPlanet
Seeker-assisted information search in mobile clouds
Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Mobile cloud computing
Signals from the crowd: uncovering social relationships through smartphone probes
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference
Optimal forwarding in delay-tolerant networks with multiple destinations
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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We examine the fundamental properties that determine the basic performance metrics for opportunistic communications. We first consider the distribution of intercontact times between mobile devices. Using a diverse set of measured mobility traces, we find as an invariant property that there is a characteristic time, order of half a day, beyond which the distribution decays exponentially. Up to this value, the distribution in many cases follows a power law, as shown in recent work. This power law finding was previously used to support the hypothesis that intercontact time has a power law tail, and that common mobility models are not adequate. However, we observe that the timescale of interest for opportunistic forwarding may be of the same order as the characteristic time, and thus, the exponential tail is important. We further show that already simple models such as random walk and random waypoint can exhibit the same dichotomy in the distribution of intercontact time as in empirical traces. Finally, we perform an extensive analysis of several properties of human mobility patterns across several dimensions, and we present empirical evidence that the return time of a mobile device to its favorite location site may already explain the observed dichotomy. Our findings suggest that existing results on the performance of forwarding schemes based on power law tails might be overly pessimistic.