CoCo

Abstract

As mobility is an important key to many applications, this work proposes a location-less model to represent mobility that is used to quantify correlations between mobility traces collected by built-in sensors on smartphones. We analyze the mobility correlations from two aspects: co-direction relationship and co-movement relationship . The former is to quantify the similarity of macroscopic moving directions between mobility traces, whereas the latter is to quantify the similarity of their microscopic vibrations. To verify the merits of the two proposed metrics, an exemplary use case, termed co-mobility detection , is considered to determine if two mobile devices share the same journey on the same mobile entity (e.g., carried by the same person). Comprehensive experiments with diverse combinations of mobility traces are conducted in three different environments with different density of Wi-Fi networks. The experimental results indicate that the proposed metrics can effectively evaluate both the coarse-grained similarity of moving directions and the fine-grained similarity of movement variations along mobility traces. The accuracy of the co-mobility detection algorithm can achieve 90% on average for mobility traces with a duration of 70 s.