Inferring Barriers of Urban City Using Mobile Phone Record

The ubiquitous mobile technology has enabled the sense of massive information of the mega population in urban areas through an efficient way. Deep analysis of huge CDR (Call Detail Record) data can help to uncover the pattern and nature of the human mobility or city dynamics. In this paper, we conduct our experiments with trajectories of millions of mobile phone subscribers. Through the exploration of the spatial pattern of caller, we study the call flow between two consecutive places where the phone call event happens and discover calling habits in most phone users. The result of our experiment reveals that the barriers or gaps of mobile communication do exist in urban city and it fits well with the landscape. It is shown that mobile call record can support and complement a wide range of studies from urban planning to traffic management.