On the heavy tail properties of spatial node density for realistic mobility modeling

In this paper, we show empirically that the spatial node density resulting from human mobility follows a power law. We also show that the number of locales visited by users also exhibit heavy-tail behavior. We develop a stochastic model that confirms our empirical observations by showing that node mobility resulting from our model closely approximates mobility recorded in real traces collected from a variety of scenarios. Besides corroborating our empirical observations, we showcase another application of our model by using it to generate mobility regimes whose spatial node density exhibit heavy-tail behavior. We validate the resulting mobility generator by comparing its output against real traces.