Wi-Fi access points can be found in any urban environment and have the potential to be a source of useful bandwidth even for users that are only in range for short periods of time. In this paper, we describe how in-motion networking is capable of exploiting short connection opportunities and transferring significant amounts of data by using only open or community access points. We describe the issues facing the in-motion user of today and present a protocol that is capable of eliminating backhaul bottlenecks at the access point's connection to the Internet. We describe and present the results of our implementation with measurements in an urban area of a city.

We study data transfer opportunities between wireless devices carried by humans. We observe that the distribution of the intercontact time (the time gap separating two contacts between the same pair of devices) may be well approximated by a power law over the range [10 minutes; 1 day]. This observation is confirmed using eight distinct experimental data sets. It is at odds with the exponential decay implied by the most commonly used mobility models. In this paper, we study how this newly uncovered characteristic of human mobility impacts one class of forwarding algorithms previously proposed. We use a simplified model based on the renewal theory to study how the parameters of the distribution impact the performance in terms of the delivery delay of these algorithms. We make recommendations for the design of well-founded opportunistic forwarding algorithms in the context of human-carried devices

Abstract — Studying transfer opportunities between wireless devices carried by humans, we observe that the distribution of the inter-contact time, that is the time gap separating two contacts of the same pair of devices, exhibits a heavy tail such as one of a power law, over a large range of value. This observation is confirmed on six distinct experimental data sets. It is at odds with the exponential decay implied by most mobility models. In this paper, we study how this new characteristic of human mobility impacts a class of previously proposed forwarding algorithms. We use a simplified model based on the renewal theory to study how the parameters of the distribution impact the delay performance of these algorithms. We make recommendation for the design of well founded opportunistic forwarding algorithms, in the context of human carried devices. I.