Impact Analysis of Realistic Human Mobility over Wireless Network

Mobility management is crucial for mobile Internet services. Mobile IPv6 and many subsequent variants aim to provide network layer mobility support for mobile nodes or mobile networks, whose performance is highly dependent on user mobility model, network topology and traffic model. Several previous researches have evaluated their performance by simulations, analytical models, and experiments. However, most of them adopt classic mobility models such as RWP without considering more realistic human mobility characteristics since most of mobile devices are carried by human being. Therefore, the performance evaluation of these solutions under realistic human mobility models becomes an important issue. In this paper we investigate human mobility characteristics and evaluates their impacts on existing mobility management protocols based on a unified simulation platform which abstracts movement parameters from realistic traces and uses them to tune other mobility models. The final results show: (1) The mobility model has an important impact on performance evaluation, and the delivery costs of RD and RWP models are different from the realistic trace which may mislead the protocols design; (2) The current mobility management protocols little consider the human mobility characteristics which cannot benefit the positive of human mobility characteristics, and they should consider the impacts of human mobility and absorb human mobility characteristics in future.