Introducing Geographic Restrictions to the SLAW Human Mobility Model

Abstract

Among other statistical features, the analysis of fine-grained GPS traces from different outdoor scenarios has shown that human mobility statistically resembles Lévy Walks and led to the design of the Self-similar Least-Action Walk (SLAW) mobility model. It was concluded that human mobility is scale-free and that this feature is invariant irrespective of any geographic constraints. These constraints were considered too scenario-specific and were omitted in SLAW. However, we argue that geographic constraints should not be considered as an unnecessary detail, but as an important feature of a realistic mobility model for the simulative performance evaluation of mobile networks. Therefore, we introduce geographic restrictions to SLAW in the form of maps. Our evaluation of the extended model (called MSLAW) shows that the introduced restrictions have a significant impact on several performance metrics relevant for opportunistic networks.