START: Status and region aware taxi mobility model for urban vehicular networks

The mobility model in urban vehicular networks is one of the most important factors that impacts the evaluation of any vehicular networking protocols via simulations. However, to obtain a realistic mobility model in the dynamic urban environment is very challenging. Recently, several studies extract mobility models from large-scale real data sets (mostly taxi GPS data) without consideration of the statuses of taxi. In this paper, we discover two simple observations related to the taxi status via mining of real taxi traces: (1) the behavior of taxi will be influenced by the statuses, and (2) the macroscopic movement is related with different geographic features in corresponding status. Based on these two observations, a novel taxi mobility model (START) is proposed with respect to taxi status and geographic region. The simulation results illustrate that proposed mobility model has a good approximation with reality in trace samples, distribution of nodes and the contact characteristics.