Analysis of Wide Area User Mobility Patterns
K.D. Simler, Steven E. Czerwinski, Anthony Douglas Joseph · 2005
In this paper, we present an analysis of user behavior and mobility patterns based on a trace of accesses to a department e-mail server. In contrast to previous studies, we consider a single service and examine how a user community connects to it while moving across a variety of different service providers ’ wireless and wired networks. By measuring an e-mail service we were able to monitor a large number of sessions originating from a diverse set of locations because e-mail is one of the few services that users habitually access. Our contributions include: a unique approach to extracting user mobility information from traces of client application interactions; a novel approach to modeling user behavior and mobility; and a demonstration of how such models can be used to generate synthetic traces. Overall, although some users are highly mobile, we find most users have a low degree of mobility – 70 % of users access their e-mail from 2 or fewer unique locations. We also find that our observed session times are longer than those reported by previous mobility studies in wireless networks. 1