A Social Motivation-aware Mobility Model for Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

In mobile opportunistic networks (MONs), human-carried mobile devices such as PDAs and smartphones, with the capability of short range wireless communications, could form various intermittent contacts due to the mobility of humans, and then could use the contact opportunity to communicate with each other. The dynamic changes of the network topology are closely related to the human mobility patterns. In this paper, we propose a social motivation-aware mobility model for MONs, which explains the basic laws of human mobility from the psychological point of view. We analyze and model social motivations of human mobility mainly in terms of expectancy value theory and affiliation motivation. Furthermore, we introduce a new concept of geographic functional cells, which not only incorporates the influence of geographical constraints on human mobility but also simplifies the complicated configuration of simulation areas. Lastly, we validate our model by simulating three real scenarios and comparing it with reality traces and other synthetic traces. The simulation results show that our model has a better match in the performance evaluation when applying social-based forwarding protocols like BUBBULE.