Characterizing the phenomenon of traffic tide for large-scale mobile cellular data networks

Abstract

With tremendous growth in demand for broadband data, we undergo severe traffic congestion problems in mobile data networks. Researchers found out that there exists spatio-temporal inhomogeneity in data traffic, which lacks a measurement-driven study. In this work, by carrying out a thorough analysis of data traffic obtained from 380,000 base stations in a large-scale metropolis of Shanghai, we quantitatively characterize the “tide” phenomenon in traffic usage. In different days, its distribution shows an exponential decay, while in different places it follows a power law distribution. These findings would provide important insights on how to deal with traffic congestion problems.