DRL: A New Mobility Model in Mobile Social Networks

Due to the complexity and variability of mobile social networks, the difficulty of evaluating protocols brings a demand to design a pragmatic mobility model, which can estimate these protocols well. A new mobility model according with the actual situation is proposed in this paper. A new characteristic of a community is defined as Community Attraction to decide the next goal of a certain node. It is related to three factors, that is, the distance between the node and the whole community, the node’s relationships with all nodes within this community, and the Location Attraction of the community. Thus, our new mobility model is called DRL (Distance, Relationship, Location). Besides, the abstract people’s social relationships as well as the Location Attractions of communities to people are firstly indicated through interaction matrices, which are initialized by the social attributes of relevant people. Finally, the simulations validate that the results of our model fit for the real data. DRL proves to be reasonable and practical for various protocol evaluations.