A call to arms: it's time for REAL mobility models

The choice of a mobility model has a significant impact on the performance of mobile network simulations. In order to accurately evaluate performance, it is important to mimic the environment in which the mobile network will be deployed. Thus, using realistic mobility models for simulation environments are preferred to synthetic models. Historically, however, unrealistic movement models have been mostly used due to their simplicity and mathematical tractability. Recently, a few mobility models have been derived from real user traces; these models, however, have not yet been adopted by the mobile research community for evaluation of protocol performance. We have implemented a realistic university campus-based pedestrian mobility model (RealMobGen) for use with the NS-2 network simulator. We offer RealMobGen to anyone interested.