Abstract-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.
Krings et al. REF used the anonymous communication patterns of 2.5 million customers of a Belgian mobile phone operator to construct a social network of customers and obtain a network of cities by grouping customers billing address (571 towns and cities).
Scaling Behaviors in the Communication Network between Cities
2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering
2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering
Computer Science