N-body: A social mobility model with support for larger populations

An accurate reproduction of real human movement is essential in simulations of MANETs in order to obtain meaningful performance results. Existing models capturing real world mobility features often require knowledge of the underlying dynamics of the target scenario, therefore limiting the application scope. In this paper we tackle this problem from a different perspective. Rather than considering the details of the target scenario, we extract features from a sample trace, and synthesize traces that have similar features. In particular, as human activities are often socially organized, resulting in a tendency of forming groups, we propose an N-body mobility model that captures the group forming tendency from traces of a small number of nodes, and reproduces them in mobility traces of a larger population. Through simulation we show that the N-body model is capable of synthesizing the group forming behavior similar to that observed from sample traces.