SWIM: A Simple Model to Generate Small Mobile Worlds

This paper presents small world in motion (SWIM), a new mobility model for ad-hoc networking. SWIM is relatively simple, is easily tuned by setting just a few parameters, and generates traces that look real–synthetic traces have the same statistical properties of real traces. SWIM shows experimentally and theoretically the presence of the power law and exponential decay dichotomy of inter-contact time, and, most importantly, our experiments show that it can predict very accurately the performance of forwarding protocols.