A smooth-trajectory mobility model for airborne networks

Abstract

Mobility models used for the design and evaluation of routing protocols for airborne networks (ANs) must catch the mobility features of the airborne vehicles. Airborne vehicles in ANs show different mobility features, such as moving with high speed and subject to some physical constraints. But existing mobility models have limitations for ANs such as sharp turn, sudden stop, etc. So, we propose a new mobility model, smooth-trajectory mobility model. According to the movement pattern of this model, the airborne vehicles randomly choose to move straight forward or make clockwise turn (or counterclockwise turn) at the transition instants to mimic the realistic movement. And to ensure smooth trajectories, the vehicles do not change their heading directions at transition instants. Because node spatial distribution is a fundamental feature of a mobility model, we first prove that the uniform distributions of location and heading direction are remained if there is a uniform initialization. Secondly, through stability analysis, we show location and heading direction are uniformly distributed regardless of the initial distribution. Also, we validate the theoretic results by simulation. Furthermore, by changing the parameters of this model, we can extend it to various mobility models.