Mobility Modeling for Personal Networks

A Personal Network (PN) is a user-centric design interconnecting numerous devices belonging to a user in different geographic locations, such as home, office, car, etc., to form a single global network to offer fully personalized services. In PNs devices of the user move in different groups, where these groups merge and split. In this paper, we design and simulate a PN Mobility Model (PNMM) to capture the characteristics of movements of devices in PNs. We propose a simple stability evaluation method for group mobility models and apply the method to PNMM. Through the stability evaluation, we find that PNMM possesses long-term steady state behavior. Moreover, for the evaluation of mobility models, some evaluation methods have been proposed, which include non-homogenous node mobility, relative node mobility in a group, and dynamics of group merging and splitting. Analysis shows that PNMM is better than other models to represent the PN mobility properties. In addition, the impact of PNMM on the performance of a PN Clustering Protocol (PNCP) has been studied. Simulation results provide insights into the performance of PNCP, and provide guidelines for future design of PN clustering. PNMM can be easily applied to any Personal Area Network or Body Area Network with slight modifications.