Understanding Mobile Traffic Patterns of Large Scale Cellular Towers in Urban Environment

Understanding mobile traffic patterns of large scale cellular towers in urban environment is extremely valuable for Internet service providers, mobile users, and government managers of modern metropolis. This paper aims at extracting and modeling the traffic patterns of large scale towers deployed in a metropolitan city. To achieve this goal, we need to address several challenges, including lack of appropriate tools for processing large scale traffic measurement data, unknown traffic patterns, as well as handling complicated factors of urban ecology and human behaviors that affect traffic patterns. Our core contribution is a powerful model which combines three dimensional information (time, locations of towers, and traffic frequency spectrum) to extract and model the traffic patterns of thousands of cellular towers. Our empirical analysis reveals the following important observations. First, only five basic time-domain traffic patterns exist among the 9,600 cellular towers. Second, each of the extracted traffic pattern maps to one type of geographical locations related to urban ecology, including residential area, business district, transport, entertainment, and comprehensive area. Third, our frequency-domain traffic spectrum analysis suggests that the traffic of any tower among the 9,600 can be constructed using a linear combination of four primary components corresponding to human activity behaviors. We believe that the proposed traffic patterns extraction and modeling methodology, combined with the empirical analysis on the mobile traffic, pave the way toward a deep understanding of the traffic patterns of large scale cellular towers in modern metropolis.Comment: To appear at IMC 201

Representing human mobility patterns in urban spaces

Human mobility is important in understanding urban spaces. Citizens interact with urban spaces using the available infrastructures, not just in the mobility sector but in public services, and in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services, that simultaneously record their footprints. Besides, the number of mobile users is increasing very rapidly in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. These additional devices will produce a great amount of data and create new big challenges for network infrastructure. Because of this new connectivity platform, and the fast growth of wireless communication, it’s important to discuss the arrival of 5G systems. They will have a large impact on coverage, spectral efficiency, data rate of global mobile traffic, and IoT devices, and in turn it will be possible to analyze the lifestyle and understand the mobility of people, such as the most frequently visited urban spaces. Therefore, this paper is relevant in the context of smart cities and will allow for an easy connection between citizens and technology innovation hub, acquiring detailed data on human movements. Based on the analysis of generated data we try to widen this view and present an integrated approach to the analysis of human mobility using LinkNYC kiosks and 311 Service Requests in New York city

The Case for Liberal Spectrum Licenses: A Technical and Economic Perspective

The traditional system of radio spectrum allocation has inefficiently restricted wireless services. Alternatively, liberal licenses ceding de facto spectrum ownership rights yield incentives for operators to maximize airwave value. These authorizations have been widely used for mobile services in the U.S. and internationally, leading to the development of highly productive services and waves of innovation in technology, applications and business models. Serious challenges to the efficacy of such a spectrum regime have arisen, however. Seeing the widespread adoption of such devices as cordless phones and wi-fi radios using bands set aside for unlicensed use, some scholars and policy makers posit that spectrum sharing technologies have become cheap and easy to deploy, mitigating airwave scarcity and, therefore, the utility of exclusive rights. This paper evaluates such claims technically and economically. We demonstrate that spectrum scarcity is alive and well. Costly conflicts over airwave use not only continue, but have intensified with scientific advances that dramatically improve the functionality of wireless devices and so increase demand for spectrum access. Exclusive ownership rights help direct spectrum inputs to where they deliver the highest social gains, making exclusive property rules relatively more socially valuable. Liberal licenses efficiently accommodate rival business models (including those commonly associated with unlicensed spectrum allocations) while mitigating the constraints levied on spectrum use by regulators imposing restrictions in traditional licenses or via use rules and technology standards in unlicensed spectrum allocations.

ANVIA ENTERPRISE WIRELESS LOCAL AREA NETWORK MARKET ANALYZES AND BUSINESS MODEL ENHANCEMENTS.

For almost 15 years, since it has been released, Wi-Fi has been one of the dominant technologies in telecommunication world. However, because of its weaknesses related to security, interference and weak quality of service it has not been accepted as a viable business. Furthermore, it also operates in unlicensed spectrum bands which magnify these issues. On the other hand, technological innovations through new improvements in the world of Wi-Fi have made it one of the most popular indoor communication solutions for enterprises as well as in outdoor common meeting points. Therefore, it has become imperative to study this subject due to its popularity and several issues associated with this technology to create a viable business model for Anvia Oyj. In an attempt to contribute towards this field, present thesis provides a comprehensive theoretical framework that addresses WLAN technology from different aspects including Wi-Fi roaming as well as the description of business model segments. In order to strengthen enterprise WLAN business models, a comprehensive data was collected through different resources. First, an internal interview in Anvia Oyj based on its current enterprise WLAN business model was conducted. Secondly, two surveys were conducted in different enterprise WLAN customer segments; 32 interviews with small office home office (SOHO) enterprises and 10 interviews with SMEs/LEs and municipalities. Thirdly, a global enterprise WLAN market analysis was conducted through Internet resources. Based on these, analyzes, recommendations and business model enhancements are suggested in this thesis. The findings of this research will help Anvia Oyj to achieve better performance in enterprise WLAN business segment.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

The design and implementation of a smart-parking system for Helsinki Area

The strain on the parking infrastructure for the general public has significantly grown as a result of the ever rising number of vehicles geared by the rapid population growth in urban areas. Consequently, finding a vacant parking space has become quite a challenging task, especially at peak hours. Drivers have to cycle back and forth a number of times before they finally find where to park. This leads to increased fuel consumption, air pollution, and increased likelihood of causing accidents, to mention but a few. Paying for the parking is not straight forward either, as the ticket machines, on top of being located at a distance, in many times, they have several payment methods drivers must prepare for. A system therefore, that would allow drivers to check for the vacant parking places before driving to a busy city, takes care of the parking fee for exact time they have used, manages electronic parking permit, is the right direction towards toppling these difficulties. The main objective of this project was to design and implement a system that would provide parking occupancy estimation, parking fee payment method, parking permit management and parking analytics for the city authorities. The project had three phases. The first and the second phases used qualitative approaches to validate our hypotheses about parking shortcoming in Helsinki area and the recruitment of participants to the pilot of the project, respectively. The third phase involved the design, implementation and installation of the system. The other objective was to study the challenges a smart parking system would face at different stages of its life cycle. The objectives of the project were achieved and the considered assumption about the challenges associated with parking in a busy city were validated. A smart parking system will allow drivers to check for available parking spaces beforehand, they are able to pay for the parking fee, they can get electronic parking permits, and the city authority can get parking analytics for the city plannin

Prospects of Mobile Search

Search faces (at least) two major challenges. One is to improve efficiency of retrieving relevant content for all digital formats (images, audio, video, 3D shapes, etc). The second is making relevant information retrievable in a range of platforms, particularly in high diffusion ones as mobiles. The two challenges are interrelated but distinct. This report aims at assessing the potential of future Mobile Search. Two broad groups of search-based applications can be identified. The first one is the adaptation and emulation of web search processes and services to the mobile environment. The second one is services exploiting the unique features of the mobile devices and the mobile environments. Examples of these context-aware services include location-based services or interfacing to the internet of things (RFID networks). The report starts by providing an introduction to mobile search. It highlights differences and commonalities with search technologies on other platforms (Chapter 1). Chapter 2 is devoted to the supply side of mobile search markets. It describes mobile markets, presents key figures and gives an outline of main business models and players. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the demand side of the market. It studies users¿ acceptance and demand using the results on a case study in Sweden. Chapter 4 presents emerging trends in technology and markets that could shape mobile search. It is the author's view after discussing with many experts. One input to this discussion was the analysis of on forward-looking scenarios for mobile developed by the authors (Chapter 5). Experts were asked to evaluate these scenarios. Another input was a questionnaire to which 61 experts responded. Drivers, barriers and enablers for mobile search have been synthesised into SWOT analysis. The report concludes with some policy recommendations in view of the likely socio-economic implications of mobile search in Europe.JRC.DG.J.4-Information Societ

Characterizing the IoT ecosystem at scale

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are extremely popular with home, business, and industrial users. To provide their services, they typically rely on a backend server in- frastructure on the Internet, which collectively form the IoT Ecosystem. This ecosys- tem is rapidly growing and offers users an increasing number of services. It also has been a source and target of significant security and privacy risks. One notable exam- ple is the recent large-scale coordinated global attacks, like Mirai, which disrupted large service providers. Thus, characterizing this ecosystem yields insights that help end-users, network operators, policymakers, and researchers better understand it, obtain a detailed view, and keep track of its evolution. In addition, they can use these insights to inform their decision-making process for mitigating this ecosystem’s security and privacy risks. In this dissertation, we characterize the IoT ecosystem at scale by (i) detecting the IoT devices in the wild, (ii) conducting a case study to measure how deployed IoT devices can affect users’ privacy, and (iii) detecting and measuring the IoT backend infrastructure. To conduct our studies, we collaborated with a large European Internet Service Provider (ISP) and a major European Internet eXchange Point (IXP). They rou- tinely collect large volumes of passive, sampled data, e.g., NetFlow and IPFIX, for their operational purposes. These data sources help providers obtain insights about their networks, and we used them to characterize the IoT ecosystem at scale. We start with IoT devices and study how to track and trace their activity in the wild. We developed and evaluated a scalable methodology to accurately detect and monitor IoT devices with limited, sparsely sampled data in the ISP and IXP. Next, we conduct a case study to measure how a myriad of deployed devices can affect the privacy of ISP subscribers. Unfortunately, we found that the privacy of a substantial fraction of IPv6 end-users is at risk. We noticed that a single device at home that encodes its MAC address into the IPv6 address could be utilized as a tracking identifier for the entire end-user prefix—even if other devices use IPv6 privacy extensions. Our results showed that IoT devices contribute the most to this privacy leakage. Finally, we focus on the backend server infrastructure and propose a methodology to identify and locate IoT backend servers operated by cloud services and IoT vendors. We analyzed their IoT traffic patterns as observed in the ISP. Our analysis sheds light on their diverse operational and deployment strategies. The need for issuing a priori unknown network-wide queries against large volumes of network flow capture data, which we used in our studies, motivated us to develop Flowyager. It is a system built on top of existing traffic capture utilities, and it relies on flow summarization techniques to reduce (i) the storage and transfer cost of flow captures and (ii) query response time. We deployed a prototype of Flowyager at both the IXP and ISP.Internet-of-Things-Geräte (IoT) sind aus vielen Haushalten, Büroräumen und In- dustrieanlagen nicht mehr wegzudenken. Um ihre Dienste zu erbringen, nutzen IoT- Geräte typischerweise auf eine Backend-Server-Infrastruktur im Internet, welche als Gesamtheit das IoT-Ökosystem bildet. Dieses Ökosystem wächst rapide an und bie- tet den Nutzern immer mehr Dienste an. Das IoT-Ökosystem ist jedoch sowohl eine Quelle als auch ein Ziel von signifikanten Risiken für die Sicherheit und Privatsphäre. Ein bemerkenswertes Beispiel sind die jüngsten groß angelegten, koordinierten globa- len Angriffe wie Mirai, durch die große Diensteanbieter gestört haben. Deshalb ist es wichtig, dieses Ökosystem zu charakterisieren, eine ganzheitliche Sicht zu bekommen und die Entwicklung zu verfolgen, damit Forscher, Entscheidungsträger, Endnutzer und Netzwerkbetreibern Einblicke und ein besseres Verständnis erlangen. Außerdem können alle Teilnehmer des Ökosystems diese Erkenntnisse nutzen, um ihre Entschei- dungsprozesse zur Verhinderung von Sicherheits- und Privatsphärerisiken zu verbes- sern. In dieser Dissertation charakterisieren wir die Gesamtheit des IoT-Ökosystems indem wir (i) IoT-Geräte im Internet detektieren, (ii) eine Fallstudie zum Einfluss von benutzten IoT-Geräten auf die Privatsphäre von Nutzern durchführen und (iii) die IoT-Backend-Infrastruktur aufdecken und vermessen. Um unsere Studien durchzuführen, arbeiten wir mit einem großen europäischen Internet- Service-Provider (ISP) und einem großen europäischen Internet-Exchange-Point (IXP) zusammen. Diese sammeln routinemäßig für operative Zwecke große Mengen an pas- siven gesampelten Daten (z.B. als NetFlow oder IPFIX). Diese Datenquellen helfen Netzwerkbetreibern Einblicke in ihre Netzwerke zu erlangen und wir verwendeten sie, um das IoT-Ökosystem ganzheitlich zu charakterisieren. Wir beginnen unsere Analysen mit IoT-Geräten und untersuchen, wie diese im Inter- net aufgespürt und verfolgt werden können. Dazu entwickelten und evaluierten wir eine skalierbare Methodik, um IoT-Geräte mit Hilfe von eingeschränkten gesampelten Daten des ISPs und IXPs präzise erkennen und beobachten können. Als Nächstes führen wir eine Fallstudie durch, in der wir messen, wie eine Unzahl von eingesetzten Geräten die Privatsphäre von ISP-Nutzern beeinflussen kann. Lei- der fanden wir heraus, dass die Privatsphäre eines substantiellen Teils von IPv6- Endnutzern bedroht ist. Wir entdeckten, dass bereits ein einzelnes Gerät im Haus, welches seine MAC-Adresse in die IPv6-Adresse kodiert, als Tracking-Identifikator für das gesamte Endnutzer-Präfix missbraucht werden kann — auch wenn andere Geräte IPv6-Privacy-Extensions verwenden. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigten, dass IoT-Geräte den Großteil dieses Privatsphäre-Verlusts verursachen. Abschließend fokussieren wir uns auf die Backend-Server-Infrastruktur und wir schla- gen eine Methodik zur Identifizierung und Lokalisierung von IoT-Backend-Servern vor, welche von Cloud-Diensten und IoT-Herstellern betrieben wird. Wir analysier- ten Muster im IoT-Verkehr, der vom ISP beobachtet wird. Unsere Analyse gibt Auf- schluss über die unterschiedlichen Strategien, wie IoT-Backend-Server betrieben und eingesetzt werden. Die Notwendigkeit a-priori unbekannte netzwerkweite Anfragen an große Mengen von Netzwerk-Flow-Daten zu stellen, welche wir in in unseren Studien verwenden, moti- vierte uns zur Entwicklung von Flowyager. Dies ist ein auf bestehenden Netzwerkverkehrs- Tools aufbauendes System und es stützt sich auf die Zusammenfassung von Verkehrs- flüssen, um (i) die Kosten für Archivierung und Transfer von Flow-Daten und (ii) die Antwortzeit von Anfragen zu reduzieren. Wir setzten einen Prototypen von Flowyager sowohl im IXP als auch im ISP ein

Alternative revenue sources for Internet service providers

The Internet has evolved from a small research network towards a large globally interconnected network. The deregulation of the Internet attracted commercial entities to provide various network and application services for profit. While Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer network connectivity services, Content Service Providers (CSPs) offer online contents and application services. Further, the ISPs that provide transit services to other ISPs and CSPs are known as transit ISPs. The ISPs that provide Internet connections to end users are known as access ISPs. Though without a central regulatory body for governing, the Internet is growing through complex economic cooperation between service providers that also compete with each other for revenues. Currently, CSPs derive high revenues from online advertising that increase with content popularity. On other hand, ISPs face low transit revenues, caused by persistent declines in per-unit traffic prices, and rising network costs fueled by increasing traffic volumes. In this thesis, we analyze various approaches by ISPs for sustaining their network infrastructures by earning extra revenues. First, we study the economics of traffic attraction by ISPs to boost transit revenues. This study demonstrates that traffic attraction and reaction to it redistribute traffic on links between Autonomous Systems (ASes) and create camps of winning, losing and neutral ASes with respect to changes in transit payments. Despite various countermeasures by losing ASes, the traffic attraction remains effective unless ASes from the winning camp cooperate with the losing ASes. While our study shows that traffic attraction has a solid potential to increase revenues for transit ISPs, this source of revenues might have negative reputation and legal consequences for the ISPs. Next, we look at hosting as an alternative source of revenues and examine hosting of online contents by transit ISPs. Using real Internet-scale measurements, this work reports a pervasive trend of content hosting throughout the transit hierarchy, validating the hosting as a prominent source of revenues for transit ISPs. In our final work, we consider a model where access ISPs derive extra revenues from online advertisements (ads). Our analysis demonstrates that the ad-based revenue model opens a significant revenue potential for access ISPs, suggesting its economic viability.This work has been supported by IMDEA Networks Institute.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Jordi Domingo-Pascual.- Vocal: Víctor López Álvarez.-Secretario: Alberto García Martíne