On improving temporal and spatial mobility metrics for wireless ad hoc networks

This work shows that two well-known spatial and temporal mobility metrics for wireless multi-hop networks have limitations, possibly resulting in misleading results. Based on the concept of spatial dependence among nodes including transient periods of no movement, we propose mobility metrics able to promptly capture spatial and temporal dependence among mobile nodes. Through simulation, we compared the metrics over an extensive set of synthetic mobility models. The results revealed that our spatial metric can accurately capture spatial dependence in scenarios having different levels of node pause time. Our temporal metric also demonstrated to be better suited for capturing different levels of temporal dependence, without being biased by node speed. Moreover, we also proposed and validated a regression model for predicting our spatial mobility metric with a 94.8% goodness-of-fit.