English

Population estimation from mobile network traffic metadata

Networking and Internet Architecture 2016-10-25 v1 Social and Information Networks

Abstract

Smartphones and other mobile devices are today pervasive across the globe. As an interesting side effect of the surge in mobile communications, mobile network operators can now easily collect a wealth of high-resolution data on the habits of large user populations. The information extracted from mobile network traffic data is very relevant in the context of population mapping: it provides a tool for the automatic and live estimation of population densities, overcoming the limitations of traditional data sources such as censuses and surveys. In this paper, we propose a new approach to infer population densities at urban scales, based on aggregated mobile network traffic metadata. Our approach allows estimating both static and dynamic populations, achieves a significant improvement in terms of accuracy with respect to state-of-the-art solutions in the literature, and is validated on different city scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.06947,
  title  = {Population estimation from mobile network traffic metadata},
  author = {Ghazaleh Khodabandelou and Vincent Gauthier and Mounim A. El-Yacoubi and Marco Fiore},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.06947},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

in proc of the 17th International Symposium on A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), 2016

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:28:11.669Z