Scaling Behaviors in the Communication Network between Cities

—We analyze the anonymous communication patterns of 2.5 million customers of a Belgian mobile phone operator. With these communications, we construct a social network of customers, that we call microscopic network. Grouping customers together by billing address city, we obtain a network of cities, which we call the macroscopic network, built from 571 towns and cities in Belgium. We show that the macroscopic network has both a degree distribution and edge weight distribution with lognormal characteristics. We find that inter-city communications can be characterized by a gravity model: the intensity of communication between two cities is proportional to the product of the two populations divided by the square of the distance between the cities. Furthermore, we observe that intra-urban communications scale superlinearly with city population.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CSE
• Authors: Gautier Krings, Francesco Calabrese, Carlo Ratti, Vincent D. Blondel
• Keywords: Anonymous Communication Patterns, Communications, CSE 2009, Macroscopic Network