Characterizing Pairwise Social Relationships Quantitatively: Interest-Oriented Mobility Modeling for Human Contacts in Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Human mobility modeling has increasingly drawn the attention of researchers working on wireless mobile networks such as delay tolerant networks (DTNs) in the last few years. So far, a number of human mobility models have been proposed to reproduce people’s social relationships, which strongly affect people’s daily life movement behaviors. However, most of them are based on the granularity of community. This paper presents interest-oriented human contacts (IHC) mobility model, which can reproduce social relationships on a pairwise granularity. As well, IHC provides two methods to generate input parameters (interest vectors) based on the social interaction matrix of target scenarios. By comparing synthetic data generated by IHC with three different real traces, we validate our model as a good approximation for human mobility. Exhaustive experiments are also conducted to show that IHC can predict well the performance of routing protocols.