Title
Human-mobility enabled networks in urban environments: Is there any (mobile wireless) small world out there?
Abstract
In the last 10 years, new paradigms for wireless networks based on human mobility have gained the attention of the research community. These paradigms, usually referred to as Pocket Switched Networks or Delay Tolerant Networks, jointly exploit human mobility and store-and-forward communications to improve the connectivity in sparse or isolated networks. Clearly, understanding the human mobility patterns is a key challenge for the design of routing protocols based on such paradigms. To this aim, we anonymously collected the positions of almost two thousand mobile phone users, spread over a metropolitan area greater than 200km^2 for roughly one month. Then, with a multi-disciplinary approach, we estimated the mobility patterns from the collected data and, assuming Wi-Fi connectivity, we inferred the contact events among the devices to evaluate the connectivity properties of a human mobility-enabled wireless network. In a nutshell, the contribution of the paper is threefold: (i) it confirms some of the results obtained in smaller environments, such as the power-law distribution for contact and inter-contact times, allowing us to estimate the distribution parameters with high statistical significance; (ii) it addresses the feasibility of the transmission opportunities provided by human mobility to build a city-wide connected network for different forwarding strategies classes; (iii) it shows uncovered characteristics of the connectivity properties of human mobility, such as the presence of the small world phenomenon in wide-scale experiments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1016/j.adhoc.2011.07.006
Ad Hoc Networks
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Measurement,Human,Mobility,Connectivity,Pocket switched networks,Delay tolerant networks,Small world
Journal
10
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
1570-8705
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.42
10
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Angela Sara Cacciapuoti138124.56
Francesco Calabrese21014.21
Marcello Caleffi351931.46
Giusy Di Lorenzo457434.54
Luigi Paura5106676.14