Description and simulation of dynamic mobility networks

During the last decade, the study of large scale complex networks has attracted a substantial amount of attention and works from several domains: sociology, biology, computer science, epidemiology. Most of such complex networks are inherently dynamic, with new vertices and links appearing while some old ones disappear. Until recently, the dynamics of these networks was less studied and there is a strong need for dynamic network models in order to sustain protocol performance evaluations and fundamental analyzes in all the research domains listed above. We propose in this paper a novel framework for the study of dynamic mobility networks. We address the characterization of dynamics by proposing an in-depth description and analysis of two real-world data sets. We show in particular that links creation and deletion processes are independent of other graph proper-ties and that such networks exhibit a large number of possible configurations, from sparse to dense. From those observations, we propose simple yet very accurate models that allow generate random mobility graphs with similar temporal behavior as the one observed in experimental data. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.