Fig. 9. Shopping center, 5:00 pm: average of 50 simulations with the enabling radius equal to 100 m.
6. Conclusions
In this paper we have presented the results of an experiment in which the positions of seven hundred humans have
been anonymously traced during a social gathering event to evaluate the possibility to disseminate alarms in a human
mobility-enabled wireless network. During our experiments we found that the considered paradigm can effectively enable
emergency communications among a significant subset of nodes, although the connectivity of the network strictly depends
on the number of cooperating devices and on the maximum allowed delay. We hope that the encouraging results of this
work will stimulate new data collection campaigns to further study large scale event scenarios for ad hoc communications.
These results could be useful as a baseline for other experiments involving different mobility traces (e.g. from volunteers)
during similar scenarios (large scale events), and for actual deployment of social communication based networks. As a future
work, we are planning to analyze the mobility and inter-contact characteristics of the infecting nodes and design alarm
dissemination strategies able to exploit these characteristics to minimize the overhead and resource requirements.