Modeling Public Safety Scenarios to Evaluate Wireless Communication Systems

When creating a scenario for performance evaluation of communication systems, modeling mobility and traffic is an important task. The results of the evaluation strongly depend on the models used. Typical assumptions of many models are uniform selection of destinations, nodes are allowed to move over the whole simulation area, and nodes are part of the network all the time (are not switched off and do not leave the network). An analysis of disaster area maneuvers provides characteristics influencing network performance in public safety communication networks like heterogeneous area-based movement, obstacles, joining/leaving of nodes, and non-uniformly distributed group communication. These characteristics differ significantly from the typical assumptions. This paper presents new models that realistically represent traffic and movement in disaster area scenarios. The new models show specific characteristics. Furthermore, the results of simulative network performance analysis are affected.