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

A Sharing- and Competition-Aware Framework for Cellular Network Evolution Planning

Mobile network operators are facing the difficult task of significantly increasing capacity to meet projected demand while keeping CAPEX and OPEX down. We argue that infrastructure sharing is a key consideration in operators' planning of the evolution of their networks, and that such planning can be viewed as a stage in the cognitive cycle. In this paper, we present a framework to model this planning process while taking into account both the ability to share resources and the constraints imposed by competition regulation (the latter quantified using the Herfindahl index). Using real-world demand and deployment data, we find that the ability to share infrastructure essentially moves capacity from rural, sparsely populated areas (where some of the current infrastructure can be decommissioned) to urban ones (where most of the next-generation base stations would be deployed), with significant increases in resource efficiency. Tight competition regulation somewhat limits the ability to share but does not entirely jeopardize those gains, while having the secondary effect of encouraging the wider deployment of next-generation technologies

A customer segmentation framework for targeted marketing in telecommunication

© 2017 IEEE. Telecommunication industry is highly competitive, and mass marketing is not applicable anymore. Moreover, Mobile customers have different behaviors that urge telecom industries to differentiate their strategies to meet customers' needs. At the same time, mobile operators have an enormous amount of customer records, and data-driven approaches can help them to draw insights from this huge amount of data. Therefore, a data-driven segmentation approach can support marketing strategies to tailor their marketing plans. In this research, we adopt behavior and beneficial segmentation in a two-dimensional framework to segment customers. The results indicate that our method has an outstanding performance for customer segmentation. Moreover, we have recommended some marketing strategies based on each segment's behavior with the aim of increasing in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and decreasing in marketing expenses

TailoredRE: A Personalized Cloud-based Traffic Redundancy Elimination for Smartphones

The exceptional rise in usages of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has contributed to a massive increase in wireless network trac both Cellular (3G/4G/LTE) and WiFi. The unprecedented growth in wireless network trac not only strain the battery of the mobile devices but also bogs down the last-hop wireless access links. Interestingly, a signicant part of this data trac exhibits high level of redundancy in them due to repeated access of popular contents in the web. Hence, a good amount of research both in academia and in industries has studied, analyzed and designed diverse systems that attempt to eliminate redundancy in the network trac. Several of the existing Trac Redundancy Elimination (TRE) solutions either does not improve last-hop wireless access links or involves inecient use of compute resources from resource-constrained mobile devices. In this research, we propose TailoredRE, a personalized cloud-based trac redundancy elimination system. The main objective of TailoredRE is to tailor TRE mechanism such that TRE is performed against selected applications rather than application agnostically, thus improving eciency by avoiding caching of unnecessary data chunks. In our system, we leverage the rich resources of the cloud to conduct TRE by ooading most of the operational cost from the smartphones or mobile devices to its clones (proxies) available in the cloud. We cluster the multiple individual user clones in the cloud based on the factors of connectedness among users such as usage of similar applications, common interests in specic web contents etc., to improve the eciency of caching in the cloud. This thesis encompasses motivation, system design along with detailed analysis of the results obtained through simulation and real implementation of TailoredRE system

Mobile Data Traffic Modeling: Revealing Temporal Facets

International audienceThis paper presents a detailed measurement-driven model of mobile data traffic usage of smartphone subscribers, using a large-scale dataset collected from a major 3G network in a dense metropolitan area. Our main contribution is a synthetic, measurement-based, mobile data traffic generator capable of simulating traffic-related activity patterns over time for different categories of subscribers and time periods for a typical day in their lives. We first characterize individual subscribers' routinary behaviour, followed by a detailed investigation of subscribers' temporal usage patterns (i.e., " when " and " how much " traffic is generated). We then classify the subscribers into six distinct profiles according to their usage patterns and model these profiles according to two daily time periods: peak and non-peak hours. We show that the synthetic trace generated by our data traffic model consistently replicates a subscriber's profiles for these two time periods when compared to the original dataset. Broadly, our observations bring important insights into temporal network resource usage. We also discuss relevant issues in traffic demands and describe implications in network solution evaluation and privacy

Joint Spatial and Temporal Classification of Mobile Traffic Demands

International audienceMobile traffic data collected by network operators is a rich source of information about human habits, and its analysis provides insights relevant to many fields, including urbanism, transportation, sociology and networking. In this paper, we present an original approach to infer both spatial and temporal structures hidden in the mobile demand, via a first-time tailoring of Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) techniques to the context of mobile traffic datasets. Casting our approach to the time or space dimensions of such datasets allows solving different problems in mobile traffic analysis, i.e., network activity profiling and land use detection, respectively. Tests with real-world mobile traffic datasets show that, in both its variants above, the proposed approach (i) yields results whose quality matches or exceeds that of state-of-the-art solutions, and (ii) provides additional joint spatiotemporal knowledge that is critical to result interpretation

A Tool to Analyze the Reading Behavior of the Users in a Mobile Digital Publishing Platform

Abstract. In their daily activities, users interact multiple times with mobile applications. This generates huge amounts of data related to these interactions that, when filtered and analyzed, would give insights on the behavior of the users while using an application. In this paper, we consider a real-world mobile digital publishing platform, named Viewerplus, which enables a digital, augmented fruition of content from traditional magazines. The objective is to develop a tool that allows the human editors to analyze the reading behavior of the users, by providing analytics that show how the users read magazine issues (i.e., how they browse an issue and move inside the app, which portions of an issue are most frequently read and which frequency, and which topics are of interest for the users during a reading session). The tool has been developed by employing a dataset extracted from the reading sessions of a magazine of an important international publisher. In this work we also employ the dataset to present a preliminary study of the user reading behavior