Prof. Dr. Klara Nahrstedt
University of Illinois, USA

Collecting real human movements has drawn significant attention from research community. The reasons are multiple, including new insights in network protocol design, network management within urban planning, and environmental impact. However, obtaining comprehensive trace of people movement with integrated context information about location, contacts and stay duration has been missing and it proves to be a hard task. In this talk we present a novel framework, called UIM (University of Illinois Movement), which includes (a) scanning process of joint location information (via WiFi scanner) and ad hoc contacts (via Bluetooth scanner) of human movement at the University of Illinois campus using Google Android phones, (b) trace analysis algorithm of joint Bluetooth/WiFi information with its inference towards characterization of people mobility patterns, and (c) data dissemination protocol which uses both WiFi access point and ad hoc contact to expedite the data forwarding. Our results show that we can characterize the detailed regularity of people movement, the visit duration of people at certain locations, and the popularity of locations. The evaluation of our dissemination protocol shows strong improvement of data forwarding delays when compared with other state-of-the-art protocols. We will conclude the talk with a short discussion of challenges when it comes to mobility patterns of different user groups and of needs for characterizing and understanding people movement patterns in different scenarios if we aim to deploy effective protocols and services on future mobile hand-held devices.