Opportunistic forwarding throughout customers or sellers in shopping mall environments

In this paper, we seek to improve understanding of human mobility patterns in environments having definite and highly organized structure, such as shopping malls. We present a method to identify individuals expressing different mobility patterns. Besides, to understand better the role of groups of message carriers expressing different mobility patterns, we performed simulations of a derivative of the Epidemic protocol with real-world mobility traces, which distinguishes between two groups of carriers, and entrusts messages through either one or the other. We discuss the implications of our results and make recommendations to guide the design of ad-hoc forwarding algorithms for delay tolerant mobile ad-hoc networks in shopping mall environments and to help modeling realistic simulation scenarios.