A mobility model for pedestrian content distribution

Mobile communication devices may be used for spreading multimedia data without support of an infrastructure. Such a scheme, where the data is carried by people walking around and relayed from device to device by means of short range radio, could potentially form a public content distribution system that spans vast urban areas. The transport mechanism is the flow of people and it can be studied but not engineered. The question addressed in this paper is how well pedestrian content distribution may work. We answer this question by modeling the mobility of people moving around in a city, constrained by a given topology. Our contributions are both the queuing analytic model that captures the flow of people and the results on the feasibility of pedestrian content distribution. Furthermore, we discuss possible extensions to the mobility model to capture speed-distance relations that emerge in dense crowds.