On the Levy-Walk Nature of Human Mobility: Do Humans Walk Like Monkeys?

The authors report that human walk patterns closely follow Levy walk patterns commonly observed in animals such as monkeys, birds and jackals. Their study is based on about one thousand hours of GPS traces involving 44 volunteers in various outdoor settings including two different college campuses, a metropolitan area, a theme park and a state fair. Important implications of this finding include that many statistical features of human walks are scale-invariant and bursty, and do not conform to the central limit theorem. None of commonly used mobility models for mobile networks captures these properties. Levy walks are more diffusive than Brownian Motion (BM) while less diffusive than Random Way Point (RWP).