Realistic mobility simulation of urban mesh networks q Jonghyun Kim, Vinay Sridhara, Stephan Bohacek * Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, United States article info Article history: Received 11 March 2007 Received in revised form 2 March 2008 Accepted 19 April 2008 Available online xxxx Keywords: Urban mesh networks Simulation Mobility Mobile wireless networks abstract It is a truism that today’s simulations of mobile wireless networks are not realistic. In real- istic simulations of urban networks, the mobility of vehicles and pedestrians is greatly influenced by the environment (e.g., the location of buildings) as well as by interaction with other nodes. For example, on a congested street or sidewalk, nodes cannot travel at their desired speed. Furthermore, the location of streets, sidewalks, hallways, etc. restricts the position of nodes, and traffic lights impact the flow of nodes. And finally, people do not wander the simulated region at random, rather, their mobility depends on whether the person is at work, at lunch, etc. In this paper, realistic simulation of mobility for urban wireless networks is addressed. In contrast to most other mobility modeling efforts, most of the aspects of the presented mobility model and model parameters are derived from sur- veys from urban planning and traffic engineering research. The mobility model discussed here is part of the UDel Models, a suite of tools for realistic simulation of urban wireless networks. The UDel Models simulation tools are available online. Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction By providing connectivity to mobile users, mesh net- works are poised to become a major extension of the Inter- net. More than 300 cities and towns have plans to deploy mesh networks, and several dozen cities have already de- ployed mesh networks [1]. While some deployments have been in smaller cities, such as Mountain View, CA and St. Cloud, FL, some deployments have been in larger cities such as Corpus Christi’s 147 sq. mile deployment [2] and Philadelphia’s 131 sq. mile deployment. These mesh net- works are meant to enhance city and emergency services communication as well as to provide city-wide, low-cost, ubiquitous Internet access for residents and visitors. Such networks promise to bring dramatic changes to data acces- sibility and hence have a major impact on society. While mesh networks have much promise, there are important issues regarding performance and scalability that have yet to be resolved. However, the lack of realistic simulators stymies the development and testing of new protocols for large-scale urban mesh networks (LUMNets). While researchers have extensively studied the simula- tion of wired networks, the influence of propagation and mobility on LUMNet performance requires new efforts in simulation. To further motivate the need for mobility and propagation simulation, consider the problem of mobility management for LUMNets (which is necessary for scalabili- ty). As is the case for mobile phone networks [3–7], there are many mobility management techniques that network designers could apply to LUMNets. However, node mobility and the propagation range of base stations greatly influence the performance of these schemes. For example, small in- door coverage areas, may result in rapid node migration, whereas large outdoor coverage areas result in slower node migration when the node is a walking person, but more rapid migration when the person is in a car. The fact that some base stations will have coverage that extends both indoors 1570-8705/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2008.04.008 q This work was prepared through collaborative participation in the Collaborative Technology Alliance for Communications and Networks sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement DAAD19-01-2-0011. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwith- standing any copyright notation thereon. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 302 831 4274; fax: +1 302 831 4316. E-mail address: bohacek@udel.edu (S. Bohacek). Ad Hoc Networks xxx (2008) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ad Hoc Networks journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/adhoc ARTICLE IN PRESS Please cite this article in press as: J. Kim et al., Realistic mobility simulation of urban mesh networks, Ad Hoc Netw. (2008), doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2008.04.008