Fine-Grained Tracking of Human Mobility in Dense Scenarios

This paper envisions an urban scenario where people carry radio devices that can be dynamically networked, by exploiting human contact opportunities, to create unplanned, improvised and localized wireless connectivity, which has been recently called pocket switched networks (PSN).The paper focuses on the radio device (pocket mobility trace recorder, or PMTR) we have on purposely designed and developed to improve this understanding by enabling the gathering of rich and detailed mobility data sets from experiments in real mobility settings. The main contribution of the paper is twofold: we firstly describe the architecture of the radio devices and, secondly, we provide some evidence of the impact short contacts have on forwarding in dense settings.