Characterizing geospatial dynamics of application usage in a 3G cellular data network

—Recent studies on cellular network measurement have provided the evidence that significant geospatial correlations, in terms of traffic volume and application access, exist in cellular network usage. Such geospatial correlation patterns provide local optimization opportunities to cellular network operators for handling the explosive growth in the traffic volume observed in recent years. To the best of our knowledge, in this paper, we provide the first fine-grained characterization of the geospatial dynamics of application usage in a 3G cellular data network. Our analysis is based on two simultaneously collected traces from the radio access network (containing location records) and the core network (containing traffic records) of a tier-1 cellular network in the United States. To better understand the application usage in our data, we first cluster cell locations based on their application distributions and then study the geospatial dynamics of application usage across differe...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Muhammad Zubair Shafiq, Lusheng Ji, Alex X. Liu, Jeffrey Pang, Jia Wang
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2012, Measurement Study, Network Measurement, Radio Access Network