Characterizing the association between mobile users using wireless network traces

In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN), the performance heavily depends on the association between mobile users, which decides how frequently the users meet with each other. It is therefore very important to understand the association. In this paper, by analyzing a number of wireless network traces, we verified the exponential distribution of the association of mobile users, which means that most mobile users are not closely associated. Furthermore, we examined the distribution of the inter-connectivity time of those mobile users more closely associated.