Human-mobility enabled networks in urban environments: Is there any (mobile wireless) small world out there?
Human-mobility enabled networks in urban environments: Is there any (mobile wireless) small world out there?
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DOI：
10.1016/j.adhoc.2011.07.006
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发表时间：
2012-11
期刊：
影响因子：
4.8
通讯作者：
A. Cacciapuoti;Francesco Calabrese;M. Caleffi;G. D. Lorenzo;L. Paura
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
A. Cacciapuoti;Francesco Calabrese;M. Caleffi;G. D. Lorenzo;L. Paura
在过去的10年中，基于人类移动性的无线网络的新范例已经获得了研究界的关注。这些范例，通常被称为口袋交换网络或延迟容忍网络，共同利用人类的移动性和存储转发通信，以提高稀疏或孤立网络的连通性。显然，了解人类的移动模式是一个关键的挑战，设计基于这种模式的路由协议。为此，我们匿名收集了近2000名移动的电话用户的位置，分布在一个超过200平方公里的大都市地区，持续了大约一个月。然后，通过多学科方法，我们从收集的数据中估计了移动模式，并假设Wi-Fi连接，我们推断了设备之间的接触事件，以评估支持人类移动性的无线网络的连接特性。简而言之，本文的贡献有三个方面：（i）它证实了在较小环境中获得的一些结果，例如接触和接触时间的幂律分布，使我们能够估计具有高度统计意义的分布参数;（二）它解决了人类流动性提供的传输机会的可行性，以建立一个城市-广泛连接的网络，不同的转发策略类;（iii）它显示了人类流动性的连接特性，如存在的小世界现象，在大规模的实验发现的特点。
In the last 10 years, new paradigms for wireless networks based on human mobility have gained the attention of the research community. These paradigms, usually referred to as Pocket Switched Networks or Delay Tolerant Networks, jointly exploit human mobility and store-and-forward communications to improve the connectivity in sparse or isolated networks. Clearly, understanding the human mobility patterns is a key challenge for the design of routing protocols based on such paradigms. To this aim, we anonymously collected the positions of almost two thousand mobile phone users, spread over a metropolitan area greater than 200km2for roughly one month. Then, with a multi-disciplinary approach, we estimated the mobility patterns from the collected data and, assuming Wi-Fi connectivity, we inferred the contact events among the devices to evaluate the connectivity properties of a human mobility-enabled wireless network. In a nutshell, the contribution of the paper is threefold: (i) it confirms some of the results obtained in smaller environments, such as the power-law distribution for contact and inter-contact times, allowing us to estimate the distribution parameters with high statistical significance; (ii) it addresses the feasibility of the transmission opportunities provided by human mobility to build a city-wide connected network for different forwarding strategies classes; (iii) it shows uncovered characteristics of the connectivity properties of human mobility, such as the presence of the small world phenomenon in wide-scale experiments.