Characterizing the Spatio-Temporal Inhomogeneity of Mobile Traffic in Large-scale Cellular Data Networks

Abstract

As the volume of mobile traffic has been growing quickly in recent years, reducing the congestion of mobile networks has become an important problem of networking research. Researchers found out that the inhomogeneity in the spatio-temporal distribution of the data traffic leads to extremely insufficient utilization of network resources. Thus, it is important to fundamentally understand this distribution to help us make better resource planning or introduce new management tools such as time-dependent pricing to reduce the congestion. However, due to the requirement of a large dataset, a detailed, radical and credible network-wide study for the spatio-temporal distribution of mobile traffic is still lacking. In this work, we conduct such a measurement study. Base on a large-scale data set obtained from 380,000 base stations in Shanghai spanning over one month, we quantitatively characterize the spatio-temporal distribution of mobile traffic and present a detailed visualized analysis. Furthermore, on the basis of quantitative analysis, we find that the mobile traffic loads uniformly follow a trimodal distribution, which is the combination of compound-exponential, power-law and exponential distributions, in terms of both spatial and temporal dimension. Extensive results show that our model is with accuracy over 99%, which provides fundamental and credible guidelines for the practical solutions of the issues in mobile traffic operations.