A Mobility Model for the Realistic Simulation of Social Context

Abstract

Simulation is a fundamental means for evaluating mobile applications based on ad-hoc networks. In recent years, the new breed of social mobility models (SMMs) has risen. Contrary to most classical mobility models, SMMs model the social aspects of human mobility, i.e. which users meet, when and how often. Such information is indispensable for the simulation of a wide range of socially-aware communication protocols mostly based on delay-tolerant networks, including opportunistic ad-hoc routing and data dissemination systems. Each SMM needs a model of the relations between a set of relevant people (called social network model – SNM) in order to simulate their mobility. Existing SMMs lack flexibility since each of them is implicitly restricted to a specific, simplifying SNM.

We present GeSoMo (General Social Mobility Model), a new SMM that separates the core mobility model from the structural description of the social network underlying the simulation. This simple and elegant design principle gives GeSoMo generalizing power: Arbitrary existing and future SNMs can be used without changing GeSoMo itself. Our evaluation results show that GeSoMo produces simulations that are coherent with a broad range of empirical data describing real-world human social behavior and mobility.