On the Influence of Microscopic Mobility in Modelling Pedestrian Communication

In the recent past, wireless network simulations involving pedestrians are getting increasing attention within the research community. Examples are crowd networking, pedestrian communication via Sidelink/D2D, wireless contact tracing to fight the Covid-19 pandemic or the evaluation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for the protection of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Since in general the mobile communication depends on the position of the pedestrians, their mobility needs to be modeled. Often simplified mobility models such as the random-waypoint or cellular automata based models are used. However, for ad hoc networks and Inter-Vehicular Communication (IVC), it is well-known that a detailed model for the microscopic mobility has a strong influence – which is why state-of-the-art simulation frameworks for IVC often combine vehicular mobility and network simulators. Therefore, this paper investigates to what extent a detailed modelling of the pedestrian mobility on an operational level influences the results of Pedestrian-to-X Communication (P2X) and its applications. We model P2X scenarios within the open-source coupled simulation environment CrowNet. It enables us to simulate the identical P2X scenario while varying the pedestrian mobility simulator as well as the used model. Two communication scenarios (pedestrian to server via 5G New Radio, pedestrian to pedestrian via PC5 Sidelink) are investigated in different mobility scenarios. Initial results demonstrate that time- and location-dependent factors represented by detailed microscopic mobility models can have a significant influence on the results of wireless communication simulations, indicating a need for more detailed pedestrian mobility models in particular for scenarios with pedestrian crowds.