Urban pedestrian mobility for mobile wireless network simulation

In order to perform precise evaluation of MANET applications in the real world, realistic mobility models are needed in wireless network simulation. In this paper, we propose a new method to create urban pedestrian flows (UPF) mobility scenarios, which reproduce the walking behavior of pedestrians in urban areas. From given densities of pedestrians observed at several points, our method derives a UPF mobility scenario that reproduces the walking behavior of pedestrians consistent with the observed densities, using linear programming techniques. We have developed a network simulator MobiREAL to design and evaluate MANET protocols and applications with this realistic mobility model. MobiREAL provides various functions and tools including a mobility model to describe the behavior of individual nodes, a GUI to assist with automatic generation of UPF mobility scenarios and a visualization tool. We have conducted some experiments using the MobiREAL simulator. Through the experiments, we have investigated the influence of node mobility on the performance of MANET protocols and have shown the usefulness of our method and the MobiREAL simulator. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.