Human Mobility Patterns in Cellular Networks

This letter investigates inter-arrival time, dwell time distributions and other mobility patterns in mobile cellular networks. It has been generally assumed and widely accepted that both inter-arrival time and dwell time distributions can be well approximated by exponential distribution. However, based on real cellular data measurements, we evaluate the fitness of various typical statistical distributions such as power-law, exponential, Weibull, lognormal and Rayleigh distributions, and find that a power-law distribution fits both inter-arrival time and dwell time more precisely. Besides, mobility patterns in daytime, night, rural and urban areas provide further demonstrations of the power-law model. Moreover, new models on the distributions of inter-departure time and the number of arrived subscribers are also proposed to characterize other mobility patterns, and the corresponding simulation results are well consistent with the empirical ones.