Does Mobility Matter? An Evaluation Methodology for Opportunistic Apps

This paper presents a methodology to guide the evaluation of social distributed applications in mobile environments. Even when applications are already designed, they exhibit a number of tuning parameters upon which network operators can act in order to improve performance. Accordingly, evaluation can be a valuable tool to determine for a particular mobile application which is the most suitable parameters setup from a performance point of view. Our methodology can be of great interest in this tuning process, thus saving both time and money. The main novelty of this methodology is the use of diversification to recreate mobile environments using both synthetic and real mobility traces. Our work focuses on how micro-mobility may impact social distributed applications. The feasibility of the paper is showed through a realistic microblogging case study.