Applied Maths Seminar: Ardon -- Modeling and simulation of encounter networks from contact traces

Simulation is an important method to evaluate the design of communication systems in
general.  Unlike conventional mobile wireless networks, packets in Opportunistic
Networks are forwarded when nodes-radios move in range of each other, i.e.  opportunity
to transmit arises.  As a result, the performance of forwarding and routing algorithms
in opportunistic networks is heavily influenced by the frequency and the duration of
physical encounters between nodes.  In addition, the time scales involved between these
encounter events are typically much larger than for mobile ad-hoc networks.  

We consider the problem of characterizing encounter networks, defined as a traditional
graph representation of communicating nodes, but with the additional time dimension.  We
set out to model encounter networks from experimental contact traces of mobile phones
carried by students during a 6 months long experiment.  We then propose EMO, an
Encounter-based MOdel designed for opportunistic network application, its evaluation and
implementation in a popular mobile network simulation package.  

http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/AppliedSeminar/abstracts/2008/ardon.html