An Obstacle-Aware Mobility Model for Campus Delay Tolerant Network

Mobility models are widely used for the evaluation of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) performance, this mitigates the need for the model that can generate patterns that guarantee the contact opportunities for a reliable package forwarding. In this paper, we present a new mobility model that describes students’ daily activities in a campus environment. As opposed to the conventional models such as a Random walk, Random waypoint, Random direction, etc which uses a free space environment, our model includes obstacles of different shapes and sizes that obstruct movement and signal propagation. We evaluate the model using ONE simulator by comparing it with the Working Day Model and Random Waypoint. The model synthetically generates traces with the distribution of contact duration and inter-contact time similar to the distribution of real traces. We further investigate its impact on the performance of DTNs routing protocols and the result shows that, it performs better than the existing models in terms of average delivered message and message latency.