Putting Contacts into Context: Mobility Modeling beyond Inter-Contact Times

Realistic mobility models are crucial for the simulation of Delay Tolerant and Opportunistic Networks. The long standing benchmark of reproducing realistic pairwise statistics (e. g., contact and inter-contact time distributions) is today mastered by state-of-theart models. However, mobility models should also reflect the macroscopic community structure of who meets whom. While some existing models reproduce realistic community structure -reflecting groups of nodes who work or live together -they fail in correctly capturing what happens between such communities: they are often connected by few bridging links between nodes who socialize outside of the context and location of their home communities. In a first step, we analyze the bridging behavior in mobility traces and show how it differs to that of mobility models. By analyzing the context and location of contacts, we then show that it is the social nature of bridges which makes them differ from intra-community links. Based on these insights, we propose a Hypergraph to model time-synchronized meetings of nodes from different communities as a social overlay. Applying this as an extension to two existing mobility models we show that it reproduces correct bridging behavior while keeping other features of the original models intact.