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| Title |
Statistical characteristics of human mobility
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| Speaker |
Injong Rhee
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| Abstract | |
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We report that human walk patterns closely follow Levy walk patterns
commonly observed in animals such as monkeys, birds and jackals. Our
study is based on about one thousand hours of GPS traces involving 44
volunteers in various outdoor settings including two different college
campuses, a metropolitan area, a theme park and a state fair.
Important implications of this finding include that many statistical
features of human walks are scale-invariant and bursty, and do not
conform to the central limit theorem. None of commonly used mobility
models for mobile networks captures these properties. Levy walks are
more diffusive than Brownian motion (BM) while less diffusive than
random way point (RWP). Based on these findings, we construct a simple
Levy walk mobility model that emulates human walk patterns expected in
outdoor mobile network environments. We demonstrate that the Levy walk
model can be used to recreate the statistical patterns commonly
observed in previous mobility studies such as the power-law
distributions of human inter-contact times and that the simulation
performance of mobile network routing protocols under the Levy walk
model exhibits distinctive performance features unexplored under
existing mobility models.
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Bio |
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Injong Rhee is Associate Professor of Computer Science at North
Carolina State University. He works primarily on developing network
protocols for the Internet. His major contributions in the field
include the development of congestion control protocols, called BIC and
CUBIC. Since 2004, these protocols have been part of the default TCP
stacks of Linux and are currently used by more than 40% of Internet
servers around the world and by several tens millions Linux users for
every day Internet communication. He also has worked on multimedia
networking and multicast. The video transport and streaming
technologies that he developed are licensed to companies for commercial
applications. He started a company based on these technologies in 2000
where he developed and launched the world's first video streaming
products and push-to-talk (PTT) VoIP products for cell phones. His
recent research areas include mobile ad hoc networks, delay/disruption
tolerant networks and sensor networks. He received NSF Career Award in
1999 and NCSU New Inventor's award in 2000.
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