Understanding Data Usage Patterns of Geographically Diverse Mobile Users

Abstract

The increasing trend of the traffic demand from mobile users and the presence of limited resources creates a challenge for network resource management. Understanding the data usage pattern and traffic demand of mobile users is a way forward to enable data-driven network resource management. However, due to the complex nature of mobile networks, understanding and characterizing data usage pattern of mobile users is a daunting task. In this work, we investigate and characterize data usage patterns and behavior of users in mobile networks. We leverage a dataset (∼340M records) collected through a crowd-based mobile network measurement platform -Netradar -across six countries. We elucidate different network factors and study how they affect the data usage patterns by taking mobile users in Finland as a use case. We perform a comparison on data usage patterns of mobile users across six countries by considering total data consumption, network access, the number of sessions created per user, throughput, and user satisfaction level on services. We show that data usage behavior of users over a mobile network is primarily driven by user mobility, the type of data subscription plan marketed by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), network congestion, and network coverage. Besides, the data usage patterns over different network technologies (e.g., preferring cellular over WiFi) and the percentage of users accessing congested networks vary by country; mostly due to the market pricing strategy and radio coverage. However, the overall data consumption (cellular and WiFi) is comparatively similar in most of the countries we studied.

Clustering and predicting the data usage patterns of geographically diverse mobile users

“…Table 1 summarizes the number of users and sessions created per country in cellular networks. We performed a detailed analysis of different network factors and data usage patterns of mobile users across six countries [31]. We showed that the data usage behavior of mobile users depends on different factors such as user mobility, presence of network congestion, the accessed radio technology type, and network coverage.…”

“…User ID is a combination of installation id, device model, device brand name, subscriber MNO, and network country. The aforementioned eight features are identified and selected based on the observation from our previous [31] and other related work [19,33].…”

Urban wireless traffic evolution: The role of new devices and the effect of policy

“…It is generally accepted that video-based applications are the most traffic-intensive and that the traffic distribution with respect to applications is highly skewed (X. Liu et al, 2018;Walelgne et al, 2021). In this context, traffic has been forecasted at the country-level considering multiple devices and applications.…”

A Classical LTE Cellular System Simulator for Computer Network Education

“…In a few decades, the world at large has experienced a steeper increase in how data is used in a cellular ecosystem [4][5][6]. As the drive for a more enhanced technology evolves in this space, the demand for a higher data rate, high connectivity speed, power efficiency, and low cost in application use also increases [7].…”