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arXiv · 1903.00433

Urban Vibes and Rural Charms: Analysis of Geographic Diversity in Mobile Service Usage at National Scale

Rajkarn Singh·Marco Fiore·Mahesh K. Marina·Alessandro Nordio·Alberto Tarable
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Abstract

We investigate spatial patterns in mobile service consumption that emerge at national scale. Our investigation focuses on a representative case study, i.e., France, where we find that: (i) the demand for popular mobile services is fairly uniform across the whole country, and only a reduced set of peculiar services (mainly operating system updates and long-lived video streaming) yields geographic diversity; (ii) even for such distinguishing services, the spatial heterogeneity of demands is limited, and a small set of consumption behaviors is sufficient to characterize most of the mobile service usage across the country; (iii) the spatial distribution of these behaviors correlates well with the urbanization level, ultimately suggesting that the adoption of geographically-diverse mobile applications is linked to a dichotomy of cities and rural areas. We derive our results through the analysis of substantial measurement data collected by a major mobile network operator, leveraging an approach rooted in information theory that can be readily applied to other scenarios.

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Rajkarn Singh, Marco Fiore, Mahesh K. Marina, Alessandro Nordio, Alberto Tarable. 2019-03-01. Urban Vibes and Rural Charms: Analysis of Geographic Diversity in Mobile Service Usage at National Scale. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313628

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