Modeling mobility in disaster area scenarios

This paper provides a model that realistically represents the movements in a disaster area scenario. The model is based on an analysis of tactical issues of civil protection. This analysis provides characteristics influencing network performance in public safety communication networks like heterogeneous area-based movement, obstacles, and joining/leaving of nodes. As these characteristics cannot be modeled with existing mobility models, we introduce a new disaster area mobility model. To examine the impact of our more realistic modeling, we compare it to existing ones (modeling the same scenario) using different pure movement and link-based metrics. The new model shows specific characteristics like heterogeneous node density. Finally, the impact of the new model is evaluated in an exemplary simulative network performance analysis. The simulations show that the new model discloses new information and has a significant impact on performance analysis.