SHER: A Colored Petri Net Based Random Mobility Model for Wireless Communications

In wireless network research, simulation is the most imperative technique to investigate the network’s behavior and validation. Wireless networks typically consist of mobile hosts; therefore, the degree of validation is influenced by the underlying mobility model, and synthetic models are implemented in simulators because real life traces are not widely available. In wireless communications, mobility is an integral part while the key role of a mobility model is to mimic the real life traveling patterns to study. The performance of routing protocols and mobility management strategies e.g. paging, registration and handoff is highly dependent to the selected mobility model. In this paper, we devise and evaluate the Show Home and Exclusive Regions (SHER), a novel two-dimensional (2-D) Colored Petri net (CPN) based formal random mobility model, which exhibits sociological behavior of a user. The model captures hotspots where a user frequently visits and spends time. Our solution eliminates six key issues of the random mobility models, i.e., sudden stops, memoryless movements, border effect, temporal dependency of velocity, pause time dependency, and speed decay in a single model. The proposed model is able to predict the future location of a mobile user and ultimately improves the performance of wireless communication networks. The model follows a uniform nodal distribution and is a mini simulator, which exhibits interesting mobility patterns. The model is also helpful to those who are not familiar with the formal modeling, and users can extract meaningful information with a single mouse-click. It is noteworthy that capturing dynamic mobility patterns through CPN is the most challenging and virulent activity of the presented research. Statistical and reachability analysis techniques are presented to elucidate and validate the performance of our proposed mobility model. The state space methods allow us to algorithmically derive the system behavior and rectify the errors of our proposed model.