Evaluating the spatial dimension of contacts in opportunistic networks

Is temporal dimension knowledge alone sufficient to characterize contacts in opportunistic networks? Several studies analyze the temporal aspect of contacts with significant results concerning the contact and inter-contact duration. Nevertheless, only the temporal dimension does not give a complete overview of contact characterization. We propose the surround indicator as a metric to exhibit the contact connectivity in opportunistic networks. We evaluate the surround indicator on two existing datasets. Our preliminary results reveal that contacts have too heterogeneous surrounds to be considered only in terms of duration.