A realistic outdoor urban pedestrian mobility model

Abstract

Existing generative mobility models, used to produce mobility data for simulated agents in, e.g., wireless network simulations, suffer from a number of limitations. Most significantly, existing models are not representative of actual human movement. We introduce a new mobility model based on state-of-the-art work in understanding pedestrian mobility patterns in urban areas, known as Space Syntax. Under our model, agents move in a meaningful fashion in terms of destination selection and pathfinding, constrained by their surroundings in an outdoor urban environment. Our model is implemented as the publicly available Destination-Based Space Syntax Simulator (DBS3). We use DBS3 to demonstrate which mobility model parameters affect wireless network simulations: centrality bias significantly affects network simulation results in non-grid-based urban centres, whereas the pathfinding metric affects results more in grid-based urban centres; distance decay has minimal impact on our wireless network metrics.