An Analysis of a Real Mobility Trace Based on Standard Mobility Metrics

Better understanding mobility, being it from pedestrians or any other moving object, is practical and insightful. Practical due to its applications to the fundamentals of communication, with special attention to wireless communication. Insightful because it might pinpoint the pros and cons of how we are moving, or being moved, around. There are plenty of studies focused on mobility in mobile wireless networks, including the proposals of several synthetic mobility models. Getting real mobility traces is not an easy task, but there has been some efforts to provide traces to the public through repositories. Synthetic mobility models are usually analyzed through mobility metrics, which are designed to capture mobility subtleties. This work research on the applicability of some representative mobility metrics for real traces analysis. To achieve that goal, a case study is accomplished with a dataset of mobility traces of taxi cabs in the city of Rome/Italy. The results suggest that the mobility metrics under consideration are capable of capturing mobility properties which would otherwise require more sophisticated analytical approaches.