Mobility Models for Next Generation Wireless Networks

Chapter 10

WLAN Mobility Models

Mobility models for WLAN environments can be broadly classified into two categories. The first category comprises models whose goal is to closely resemble user/AP registration patterns observed in WLAN traces. Models in this category, such as those presented in Jain et al. (2005), Lee and Hou (2006), Lelescu et al. (2006), Chinchilla et al. (2004), and Tuduce and Gross (2005), can be used, for instance, to predict the next user AP association given the current association. Physical user mobility in these models is then not explicitly modeled, although it can be deduced from a user's AP association pattern. The second category of models is instead aimed at modeling user physical mobility. In this case, the history of a user's AP associations is used to generate a realistic trace of the user's physical mobility in the environment. By aggregating traces of several users, a statistical model of user physical mobility in the WLAN environment can be derived and used to faithfully reproduce the physical movement of users. Examples of models in this category are given in Hsu et al. (2004) and Kim et al. (2006).

In this chapter, we will present two representative mobility models for each of these two categories of WLAN models. More specifically, we will present:

1. The model introduced in Lee and Hou (2006), which we name LH, whose purpose is to generate synthetic user/AP association patterns resembling features observed in real-world traces, in particular ...