Georgia Tech: Networking & Telecommunications Group


 
Title Statistical characteristics of human mobility
Speaker Injong Rhee
Abstract
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.

Bio

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.