Measuring Group Mobility: A Topology Based Approach

In highly mobile networks, mobility based clustering schemes exploit the group mobility of nodes to form stable communication structure by grouping nodes with similar mobility pattern together. However, existing group mobility metrics cannot assess quantitatively whether a mobility model can provide the necessary degree of group mobility. In this paper, we propose a novel metric, Degree of Node Reachability (DNR), to measure the degree of group mobility from the perspective of network topology. Based on DNR, we propose r-test to quantitatively assess whether a given mobility model will fail to satisfy the required network condition. The proposed metric is validated using common mobility models. The simulation results show that our metric can capture the network topology changes and reflect the impact of underlying node mobility. In addition, r-test is shown to provide a viable means to assess the level of group mobility of a given mobility model.