Analysis-of-Human-Mobility-Datasets.md

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 
 ## Abstract
 
-This report describes the Briar team's ongoing research into human mobility patterns and their implications for the design of delay-tolerant networks.
+This report describes the Briar team's ongoing research into human mobility patterns and the implications of these patterns for the design of delay-tolerant networks.
 We analyse three published datasets that record encounters between people carrying short-range wireless devices in different enviroments: an urban university, an office building and a rural village.
 
 We construct *static and dynamic contact graphs* for each dataset and analyse these graphs to understand the emergent structures created by the individual encounters.
@@ -756,6 +756,11 @@ For many sender-recipient pairs, latencies are on the order of days or weeks - m
 
 Many activities that we're used to coordinating through Internet-based tools would be seriously disrupted by communication latencies of days or weeks, so this finding calls into question the whole notion of using tools built on delay-tolerant networks as functional replacements for Internet-based tools.
 
-All of the datasets we studied were collected by asking people to go about their everyday lives while carrying or wearing measurement devices: the participants were not asked to make any special effort to have encounters that could be useful for forming a delay-tolerant network.
+All of the datasets we analysed were collected by asking people to go about their everyday lives while carrying or wearing measurement devices: the participants weren't asked to make any special effort to meet up with each other in ways that could be useful for forming a delay-tolerant network.
 This raises the possibility that performance (specifically latency) might be improved if some of the participants were purposefully taking part in carrying and passing on messages, rather than merely doing so as a side-effect of going about their usual business.
 This is a possibility we intend to explore in future research.
+
+Another possibility we intend to explore is specific to the scenario of a partial Internet shutdown, where some devices (for example, those using the mobile phone network) lose access to the Internet, while others (for example, those using terrestrial broadband) still have access.
+Partial shutdowns are increasingly common as governments try to balance the intended repressive effects of shutdowns against the usually unintended economic consequences.
+They can also happen accidentally due to uneven implementation of shutdown orders.
+During a partial shutdown, a relatively small number of devices with Internet access might be able to connect to each other over long distances, creating "shortcuts" across the contact graph and allowing devices without Internet access to reach each other with lower latency than would otherwise be the case.