Analysis of user behavior from billing records of a CDPD wireless network

Collection of user statistics and network traffic is crucial for understanding user behavior and for creating network workload models. It is also valuable for the management of commercial wireless networks. In this paper, we report on the analysis of billing records collected from the Telus Mobility Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) network. The longest continuous billing record that we examined covered approximately twenty one days, spanning the Christmas and New Year holiday seasons. We used various tools to graphically illustrate the billing data. We observed that network activities exhibit daily and weekly cycles. Furthermore, the clustering analysis revealed four distinct behavioral classes of users. Analysis of billing data provided useful information about the usage of an operational wireless network.