On profiling mobility and predicting locations of wireless users

Joy Ghosh, Matthew J. Beal, Hung Q. Ngo, Chunming Qiao
2006 Proceedings of the second international workshop on Multi-hop ad hoc networks: from theory to reality - REALMAN '06  
In this paper, we analyze a year long wireless network users' mobility trace data collected on ETH Zurich campus. Unlike earlier work in [4, 18] , we profile the movement pattern of wireless users and predict their locations. More specifically, we show that each network user regularly visits a list of places such as a building (also referred to as "hubs") with some probability. The daily list of hubs, along with their corresponding visit probabilities, are referred to as a mobility profile. We
more » ... lso show that over a period of time (e.g., a week), a user may repeatedly follow a mixture of mobility profiles with certain probabilities associated with each of the profiles. Our analysis of the mobility trace data not only validate the existence of our so-called sociological orbits [8], but also demonstrate the advantages of exploiting it in performing hub-level location predictions. In particular, we show that such profile based location predictions are more precise than common statistical approaches based on observed hub visitation frequencies alone.
doi:10.1145/1132983.1132993 dblp:conf/mobihoc/GhoshB0Q06 fatcat:zisoqfjn2ncyxly6k5dv3h4a4e