Network locality in wireless networks

The locality of reference is a well studied phenomenon in computer systems. As one special case, the network locality has been demonstrated to exist in the wired local area networks. Previous research suggests that the network traffic does not follow uniform distribution. In this paper, we explore the network locality in the wireless networks. We take a close look at wireless traces from wireless local area networks (WLANs) and wireless mesh network simulations with different routing protocols to analyze various network locality characteristics. We also measure a new network locality characteristic to explore the possible use of such property in the network coding. Our experiment validates the prevailing existence of network locality in wireless networks and shows how these network locality characteristics are different from those in the wired networks.