A Mobility Model for Personal Networks (PN)

Being highly user-centric, Personal Networks (PN) enable interconnection between various devices of a user (personal devices) in different geographic locations, such as home, office, car, etc., to form one secure network for the user. In this paper we analyze properties of node mobility in PNs first. We address typical PN scenarios where personal devices in the vicinity naturally form a small cluster and move in groups to support the demands of a user. Based on the PN mobility properties studied on the basis of the scenarios, a PN Mobility Model (PNMM) is proposed. PNMM can be used to evaluate the techniques and protocols designed for PN implementations. We evaluate PNMM, compare it with other mobility models, and show that PNMM applies better than other models with respect to the behaviors of nodes in PNs. Moreover, to evaluate mobility models some evaluation methods have been proposed to examine to what degree mobility model can represent the properties of a certain scenario. This includes node mobility, heterogeneity, relative node mobility in a group, and dynamics of group merge and split Keywords—Personal Network (PN), ad hoc network, PN Mobility Model