The NetMob23 Dataset: A High-resolution Multi-region Service-level Mobile Data Traffic Cartography

Abstract

Digital sources have been enabling unprecedented data-driven and large-scale investigations across a wide range of domains, including demography, sociology, geography, urbanism, criminology, and engineering. A major barrier to innovation is represented by the limited availability of dependable digital datasets, especially in the context of data gathered by mobile network operators or service providers, due to concerns about user privacy and industrial competition. The resulting lack of reference datasets curbs the production of new research methods and results, and prevents verifiability and reproducibility of research outcomes. The NetMob23 dataset offers a rare opportunity to the multidisciplinary research community to access rich data about the spatio-temporal consumption of mobile applications in a developed country. The generation process of the dataset sets a new quality standard, leading to information about the demands generated by 68 popular mobile services, geo-referenced at a high resolution of $100\times100$ $m^2$ over 20 metropolitan areas in France, and monitored during 77 consecutive days in 2019