Characterizing the phenomenon of traffic tide for large-scale mobile cellular data networks

With tremendous growth in demand for broadband data, we undergo severe traffic congestion problems in mobile data networks. Researchers found out that there exists spatio-temporal inhomogeneity in data traffic, which lacks a measurement-driven study. In this work, by carrying out a thorough analysis of data traffic obtained from 380,000 base stations in a large-scale metropolis of Shanghai, we quantitatively characterize the “tide” phenomenon in traffic usage. In different days, its distribution shows an exponential decay, while in different places it follows a power law distribution. These findings would provide important insights on how to deal with traffic congestion problems.