Predictability of WLAN Mobility and Its Effects on Bandwidth Provisioning

— Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are emerging as a popular technology for access to the Internet and enterprise networks. In the long term, the success of WLANs depends on services that support mobile network clients. Although other researchers have explored mobility prediction in hypothetical scenarios, evaluating their predictors analytically or with synthetic data, few studies have been able to evaluate their predictors with real user mobility data. As a first step towards filling this fundamental gap, we work with a large data set collected from the Dartmouth College campus-wide wireless network that hosts more than 500 access points and 6,000 users. Extending our earlier work that focuses on predicting the next-visited access point (i.e., location), in this work we explore the predictability of the time of user mobility. Indeed, our contributions are two-fold. First, we evaluate a series of predictors that reflect possible dependencies across time and space while bene�...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Libo Song, Udayan Deshpande, Ulas C. Kozat, David Kotz, Ravi Jain
• Keywords: Case Study, Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Mobility Data, User Mobility