Towards characterizing primary usage in cellular networks: A traffic-based study

An in depth understanding of cellular traffic, and thus of spectrum usage, is essential for estimating better opportunities offered by a secondary use of spectrum. Due to the fact that user activity in cellular networks is expected to exhibit a highly dynamic behavior in space and time, there is a significant benefit to be gained from measurement-driven studies. A careful analysis of spatio-temporal traffic patterns provides us insights not only in the efficiency of cellular networks, but these models can be used to model future use of and need for secondary spectrum. Towards this direction our aim in this paper is to present a part of our on-going work on the analysis of real-world traffic data collected within a country-wide GSM cellular network for a period of four weeks.