SIMPS: Using Sociology for Personal Mobility

Abstract

Assessing mobility in a thorough fashion is a crucial step toward more efficient mobile network design. Recent research on mobility has focused on two main points: analyzing models and studying their impact on data transport. These works investigate the <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">consequences</i> of mobility. In this paper, instead, we focus on the <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">causes</i> of mobility. Starting from established research in sociology, we propose SIMPS, a mobility model of human crowds with pedestrian motion. This model defines a process called sociostation, rendered by two complimentary behaviors, namely socialize and isolate, that regulate an individual with regard to her/his own sociability level. SIMPS leads to results that agree with scaling laws observed both in small-scale and large-scale human motion. Although our model defines only two simple individual behaviors, we observe many emerging collective behaviors (group formation/splitting, path formation, and evolution).