Human Mobility Models and Opportunistic Communication System Design

In this paper we seek to improve understanding of the structure of human mobility, with a view to using this for designing algorithms for the dissemination of data amongst mobile users. Cooperation binds but also divides human society into communities. Members of the same community interact with each other preferentially. There is structure in human society. Within society and its communities, individuals have varying popularity. Some people are more popular and interact with more people than others; we may call them hubs. Popularity ranking is one facet of the population. In many physical networks, some nodes are more highly connected to each other than to the rest of the network. The set of such nodes are usually called clusters, communities, cohesive groups or modules. There is also structure to social networking. Different metrics can be used such as information flow, Freeman betweenness, closeness and inference power, but for all of them, each node in the network can be assigned a global centrality value.