Human mobility in shopping mall environments

The need for a network when there is no infrastructure is no longer limited to military and emergency applications; ad hoc networks can support private and public applications as well. Ad hoc networking has been a dynamically growing research area in recent years. In order to conduct informed and realistic design of forwarding policies and algorithms for mobile ad-hoc delay tolerant networks, it is important to gather appropriate real human mobility data. In this paper we study human mobility in a shopping mall environment. In such an environment, people using network devices such as mobile phones, PDA, etc. could be willing to communicate in a variety of ways, without the mediation of routing across the global Internet. The ultimate goal is to enable a multitude of users at any place in the shopping mall to access/receive appropriate local information at any time. We discuss the implications of our results and make recommendations for the design of opportunistic forwarding algorithms for shopping mall environments.