Simulating the Impact of Mobility on Network Bandwidth Utilization.pdf

Simulating the Impact of Mobility on Network Bandwidth Utilization Abstract Pervasive computing environments accommodate interconnected and communicating mobile devices. Mobility is a vital aspect of ev- eryday life and technology must offer support for moving users, ob- jects, and devices. Their growing number has strong implications on the bandwidth of wireless and wired networks. Network bandwidth becomes a scare resource and its efficient use is crucial for the quality of service in pervasive computing. In this article we study process models for detecting location changes of moving objects and their ef- fect on the network bandwidth. We simulate a scenario of 106 moving objects for a period of 107 time cycles while monitoring the quality of service with respect to network bandwidth for different location detection strategies. The simulation shows that the class of strate- gies implementing a synchronous model offers better quality of service than the timed model. We conclude the article with a set of guidelines for the application of the strategies we have investigated. 1 1 Introduction Technological advances allow manufacturing smaller and more portable but increasingly powerful computing devices, which are equipped with wireless communicating capabilities. The integration of information processing into wirelessly interconnected everyday objects is the primary goal of pervasive computing [12, 9]. A pragmatic variant of the pervasive computing paradigm has been described by IBM chairman Lou Gerstner: a billion people inter- acting with a million e-businesses through a trillion interconnected intelligent devices.