Content consumption cartography of the Paris urban region using cellular probe data

A present issue in the evolution of mobile cellular networks is determining whether, how and where to deploy adaptive content and cloud distribution solutions at base station and back-hauling network level. In order to answer these questions, in this paper we document the content consumption in Orange cellular network for Paris metropolitan area. From spatial and application-level extensive analysis of real data, we numerically and statistically quantify the geographical distribution of content consumption with per-service classifications. We provide experimental statistical distributions usable for further research in the area

Not all Apps are created equal: analysis of spatiotemporal heterogeneity in nationwide mobile service usage

Proceeding of: 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT '17)We investigate how individual mobile services are consumed at a national scale, by studying data collected in a 3G/4G mobile network deployed over a major European country. Through correlation and clustering analyses, our study unveils a strong heterogeneity in the demand for different mobile services, both in time and space. In particular, we show that: (i) somehow surprisingly, almost all considered services exhibit quite different temporal usage patterns; (ii) in contrast to such temporal behavior, spatial patterns are fairly uniform across all services; (iii) when looking at usage patterns at different locations, the average traffic volume per user is dependent on the urbanization level, yet its temporal dynamics are not. Our findings do not only have sociological implications, but are also relevant to the orchestration of network resources.This research work has been performed in the framework of the H2020-ICT-2014-2 project 5G NORMA (Grant Agreement No. 671584)

A Tale of Ten Cities: Characterizing Signatures of Mobile Traffic in Urban Areas

International audienceUrban landscapes present a variety of socio-topological environments that are associated to diverse human activities. As the latter affect the way individuals connect with each other, a bound exists between the urban tissue and the mobile communication demand. In this paper, we investigate the heterogeneous patterns emerging in the mobile communication activity recorded within metropolitan regions. To that end, we introduce an original technique to identify classes of mobile traffic signatures that are distinctive of different urban fabrics. Our proposed technique outperforms previous approaches when confronted to ground-truth information, and allows characterizing the mobile demand in greater detail than that attained in the literature to date. We apply our technique to extensive real-world data collected by major mobile operators in ten cities. Results unveil the diversity of baseline communication activities across countries, but also evidence the existence of a number of mobile traffic signatures that are common to all studied areas and specific to particular land uses

TRANSIT: Fine-Grained Human Mobility Trajectory Inference at Scale with Mobile Network Signaling Data

International audienceCall detail records (CDR) collected by mobile phone network providers have been largely used to model and analyze human-centric mobility. Despite their potential, they are limited in terms of both spatial and temporal accuracy thus being unable to capture detailed human mobility information. Network Signaling Data (NSD) represent a much richer source of spatio-temporal information currently collected by network providers, but mostly unexploited for fine-grained reconstruction of human-centric trajectories. In this paper, we present TRANSIT, TRAjectory inference from Network SIgnaling daTa, a novel framework capable of proceessing NSD to accurately distinguish mobility phases from stationary activities for individual mobile devices, and reconstruct, at scale, fine-grained human mobility trajectories, by exploiting the inherent recurrence of human mobility and the higher sampling rate of NSD. The validation on a ground-truth dataset of GPS trajectories showcases the superior performance of TRANSIT (80% precision and 96% recall) with respect to state-of-the-art solutions in the identification of movement periods, as well as an average 190 m spatial accuracy in the estimation of the trajectories. We also leverage TRANSIT to process a unique large-scale NSD dataset of more than 10 millions of individuals and perform an exploratory analysis of city-wide transport mode shares, recurrent commuting paths, urban attractivity and analysis of mobility flows

Using mobile phone geolocalisation for 'socio-geographical' analysis of co-ordination, urban mobilities, and social integration patterns

We report here on research aiming to reconstruct urban mobilities and communication practices through mobile phone base data. We have developed a software probe that can be implemented on a user's mobile phone, and which allows the joint recording and collection of the successive locations experienced by the user (through the identification of the cell in which the mobile phone is located) and all types of communicative acts performed through the mobile phone. This has been combined to indepth interviews with subjects over one week of their mobility and mobile communication behaviour. The method has been tested over a sample of 24 adults living in Paris, all in the 30-45 age range, half male and half female, with varying histories of mobility and professional flexibility constraints, in order to reconstruct their mobility and their communication-based activity spaces. We show how such a method enables the construction of a long time perspective on mobilities, and particularly on the articulation of displacements and mobile communication, which is an important issue in the 'new mobilities paradigm'. We show how, over longer periods, mobility and communication practices combine into patterns marking social integration (or disintegration). We also show how our method allows us to construct new types of indicators, such as the propensity to communicate from a given type of place per unit of time, that reveal underlying patterns such as a higher propensity to call in mobile situations and transitory locations. This type of approach may be particularly relevant to the ongoing convergence of transport and communication studies, and to bridge the gap between communication research and mobility studies. Copyright (c) 2008 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.