Exploring Sociological Orbits in Mobile Users Mobility Pattern

This project is exploring a novel concept of macro-level mobility of MANET and WLAN users called "Sociological Orbits". This concept is based on the observation that mobile users' movements often obey a partially deterministic (and repetitive) "orbital" pattern involving a set of relatively small geographic regions called "hubs", which are of some social interest. This concept is being validated using existing mobility trace data, and if proven true, will lead to more scalable and efficient routing protocols for MANETs. This effort will have impact on the fundamental assumptions of mobile ad hoc networking as well as on graduate student education