1st International ICST Workshop on Scenarios for Network Evaluation Studies

Research Article

A mobility model for pedestrian content distribution

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.SIMUTOOLS2009.5645,
        author={Vladimir  Vukadinovic and \^{O}lafur Ragnar  Helgason and Gunnar  Karlsson},
        title={A mobility model for pedestrian content distribution},
        proceedings={1st International ICST Workshop on Scenarios for Network Evaluation Studies},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={SCENES},
        year={2010},
        month={5},
        keywords={Delay-tolerant networks broadcast multicast content distribution queuing analysis mobility modeling.},
        doi={10.4108/ICST.SIMUTOOLS2009.5645}
    }
    
  • Vladimir Vukadinovic
    Ólafur Ragnar Helgason
    Gunnar Karlsson
    Year: 2010
    A mobility model for pedestrian content distribution
    SCENES
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/ICST.SIMUTOOLS2009.5645
Vladimir Vukadinovic1,*, Ólafur Ragnar Helgason2,*, Gunnar Karlsson3,*
  • 1: School of Electrical Engineering, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden. +4687904263
  • 2: School of Electrical Engineering, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden. +4687904251
  • 3: School of Electrical Engineering, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden. +4687904257
*Contact email: vvuk@ee.kth.se, olafurr@ee.kth.se, gk@ee.kth.se

Abstract

Mobile communication devices may be used for spreading multimedia data without support of an infrastructure. Such a scheme, where the data is carried by people walking around and relayed from device to device by means of short range radio, could potentially form a public content distribution system that spans vast urban areas. The transport mechanism is the flow of people and it can be studied but not engineered. The question addressed in this paper is how well pedestrian content distribution may work. We answer this question by modeling the mobility of people moving around in a city, constrained by a given topology. Our contributions are both the queuing analytic model that captures the flow of people and the results on the feasibility of pedestrian content distribution. Furthermore, we discuss possible extensions to the mobility model to capture speed-distance relations that emerge in dense crowds.