On the Impact of Realism of Mobility Models for Wireless Networks

We present PedSims, a suite of mobility models spanning the entire range from the classic random waypoint (RWP), to correlated movement, to trace-level-quality social-activity-based mobility. Instrumenting PedSims at various levels of structural complexity we assess and quantify the impact of real world mobility patterns, such as common interests or synchronous behavior, on ad hoc network performance. Thus, PedSims provides not only a flexible platform for mobility simulation but also a means to strike a trade-off between a tolerable error and computational complexity. Notably, as our study of DSR, AODV and SAFARI finds, neglecting to capture mobility patterns may result in inversion of the ranking of routing protocols as well as in over- and under-estimation of network performance. Further contributions include a bias correction for the sampling of node-node connection time.