Mobility Models for Next Generation Wireless Networks

Chapter 1

Next Generation Wireless Networks

Wireless networks nowadays are part of our everyday life, as witnessed by several features: the number of cell (mobile) phone subscriptions reached 4.6 billion in February 2010 (News 2010) and is expected to reach 6 billion (corresponding to about 72% of current world population) by the middle of 2012; short-range radio technologies such as WiFi (Alliance 2011a) and Bluetooth (Bluetooth-SIG 2011) are widespread; innovative technologies based on short-range wireless communication and miniaturized sensor devices have recently been standardized (Alliance 2011b), or are in the final steps of standardization; radio frequency IDs (RFIDs) are becoming a prominent technology in logistics and object tracking; short-range radio technology is being developed and will shortly be deployed onboard vehicles to improve safety conditions on the road and to enable innovative intelligent transportation systems; and so on.

A major outcome of intensive research in both industry and academia in recent years has been the consolidation of a wealth of short-range, inexpensive radio technologies, which promoted, and will promote even further in forthcoming years, the definition of novel network architectures such as ad hoc networks, mesh networks, wireless sensor networks, vehicular networks, and opportunistic networks. It is widely believed that these classes of networks, which we call next generation wireless networks, will enable the vision of “ubiquitous computing” ...