META: A Mobility Model of MEtropolitan TAxis Extracted from GPS Traces

In this paper, we present our study of extracting a mobility model for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) from a large amount of real taxi GPS trace data. In order to capture characteristics of the urban vehicle network from microscopic to macroscopic aspects, we design three parameters and extract their values from the GPS trace data. Using this mobility model, we can generate the synthetic trace to simulate the movement of taxis in the urban area of a metropolis. The validation is carried through extensive comparisons between the synthetic trace and the real trace. Validation results show that our mobility model has a good approximation to the real scenario.