Modeling mobility and workload for wireless metropolitan area networks

  • Authors:

  • Matthias Hollick;Tronje Krop;Jens Schmitt;Hans-Peter Huth;Ralf Steinmetz

  • Affiliations:

  • Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany;Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany;Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany;Department of Information and Communications, Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, Munich, Germany;Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Research on large-scale wireless metropolitan area networks, which offer broadband capacity while supporting user and terminal mobility suffers from the lack of realistic mobility and workload models. There is a strong need for such models to be able to perform sound simulations supporting important yet difficult tasks like network planning and traffic engineering. In this paper, a novel approach towards realistic modeling of user mobility is proposed and studied. We formulate an analytical model, which is a hybrid of an empirical mobility model and a synthetic traffic model. The model clearly separates the influence of mobility and traffic to allow for greater flexibility. The mobility part is based on the combination of statistical zoning information with field data of movement patterns. This allows us to predict the density of users-classified into different groups-for a given area at a given time. We are able to integrate different traffic characteristics on top of our mobility model elegantly. The combination of user density with the predicted-synthetic-traffic of the modeled user groups gives the traffic and fluctuations of traffic throughout the network, thus describing the workload for the envisioned scenario. We present the instantiation of our model for the example of a real city. Analysis and simulations are provided which show that the proposed scheme is quite prospective. Our findings are, that our model is able to cover the macroscopic effects of real-world behavior more precisely than currently available mobility/workload models.