Analyzing & Predicting patterns into your Geo enabled customer data

Wael Tawfiq Yahya

GISTEC

Agenda

• Mobile Phone technology

• Technologies prior to mobile phones

• Working of a cell-phone network

• Mobile phone generations

• Mobile phone data

• Applications

What are mobile phones?

Mobile phones are radio transceivers

(= transmitters and receivers in one)

that are connected to each other via cell towers.

Radio technology

Radio receiver

Receives carrier waves and decode them into hearable frequency range (20 to 20,000 Hz)

Radio transmitter

Encodes audio to high frequency

carrier waves.

AM: 540 to 1700 kHz

FM: 88 to 108 MHz

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Walkie-talkie communication

– Walkie-talkies are communication devices developed during the Second World War

– A walkie-talkie = radio transceiver (transmitter + receiver)

– Maximum range: around 15 kilometers

– A walkie-talkie is a simplex device, i.e., only one person can talk at a time. By default it

is in receive mode. When the button push-to-talk is pressed, it changes to transmit

mode.

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Car telephone system

• First mobile phones were car telephones

• Introduced in 1946 in the USA

• Also known as citizens band (CB) radio

• Simplex device: one-way communication only (via push-to-talk button)

• Widely used up to and including the 1980s

• Decline started when mobile cell-phones became popular in the 1990s.

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Car telephone system: setup

Urban antennas: one per major US city.

Only around 20 channels available per antenna.

• Powerful transmitter needed to

transmit across 70 km

• The original equipment weighted

36 kg!

Highway antennas: served major land

and water routes.

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Cell-phone network

Why are mobile phones also called cell-phones?

• The target area is chopped into small cells such that each cell is covered by a cell tower.

cell tower

A cell-plan consisting of hexagon shaped cells

covered cell

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Cell-phone network (2)

The system of cells has two advantages:

1. Cell phones only require low-power transmitters. Therefore, small batteries are sufficient, resulting in light-weight portable devices

2. Communication frequencies can be re-used without disturbance of nearby cell towers. To prevent that neighboring towers use the same frequency, the following pattern can be used, where each color represents a different frequency:

Intermezzo: a math exercise Question: Given an arbitrary separation of a plane into continuous regions, how many colors do you require at least to color the regions such that adjacent regions have different colors?

Seven frequencies re-used

Answer: 4

Network components

BTS: base transceiver station BSC: base station controller MSC: mobile switching center

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Base Transceiver Stations (BTS)

Cell tower • 3 antennas, each covering

120º • Coverage up to 40 km

Rooftop cell site • Coverage up to 40 km

Small cell • Coverage up to 2 km

Indoor cell • Coverage 200 m

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Cell-plan

In this simplified cell-plan, we assumed non-directional antennae, i.e., with a 360º coverage

In reality, most antennae are directional, with a coverage around 120º.

Moreover, cells overlap each other, i.e., a device is not always connected to the nearest antenna!

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Cell-plan

Cell site (BTS) Cell antenna Cell coverage area

A more realistic but small example:

Triangulation

• Using triangulation methods, the exact the geographical location can be determined given the antenna locations and distances.

• A graphical method is used in the shown picture, where for each antenna, a circle is drawn with the radius equal to the connecting distance. The intersection point of the three circles is the exact location of the device.

Mobile Phone generations

Generation / description Year of introduction

0G Mobile radio telephone, used in car telephones.

1940’s - 1970’s

1G Mobile analog telecommunications.

1981

2G Global System for Mobile Telecommunications (GSM) standard. Digital encryption used. Introduction of SMS and MMS messages.

1991

3G Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS) and CDMA2000 standards. Introduction of mobile internet. 10 Mb/s

2001

4G Mobile broadband data, including voice over data. Enabling video conferencing and cloud computing. Download rates: - 100 Mb/s at high mobility (cars/trains) - 1 Gb/s at low mobility (pedestrians)

2008

5G High speed mobile internet. Probably around 10Gb/s. 2020

Sources of mobile phone metadata

Mobile phone metadata may contain any information related to the network infrastructure, mobile phone usage, and sensors. It does not contain content of calls, text messages, and data.

1. Logged mobile positioning data • Call Detail Records (CDR), logged for billing, only contain data of active devices

(call/text/data).

• Network data is sometimes logged for communication traffic analysis in view of network optimisation.

2. Real-time mobile positioning data • Data queried by mobile phone operators in order to track devices in real-time. This

data are not logged systematically.

• Sometimes called signaling data.

3. Locally collected sensor data • A smartphone app can record GPS signal (e.g. Strava).

• Moreover, a modern smartphone has over a dozen of other sensors (such as an accelerometer, barometer, and gyroscope).

Call Detail Records (CDR)

• Calls, text messages, and data usage are being logged for billing

• Also called Event Detail Records (EDR)

• It does not contain the communication content of the logged events.

• The CDR format has an international standard. This enables providers to exchange these data, and therefore charge foreigners for using mobile phones abroad.

Events logged by CDR

• Events that are logged: • Call (both outgoing and incoming)

• SMS (both outgoing and incoming)

• Data (depends on provider, e.g. once every x minutes, once per x MB used)

• A modern smartphone (using 4G) may have over a 100 events a day, mostly data related.

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CDR record description

A record in a CDR file contains:

• event type (call, SMS, data)

• the starting time of the event (date and time)

• the event duration

• Mobile Country Code (MCC)

• Mobile Network Code (MNC)

• for the originating party (e.g. caller): • International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), which identifies a phone number

• International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), which identifies a device

• ID of the site (base transceiver station) at the start of the event

• ID of the cell (antenna) at the start of the event

• for the receiving party (e.g. called person): the same data as for the originating party

The latest development is that the exact location, derived by triangulation, is included instead of the site and cell ID. See Jiang et al (2016).

Real-time mobile positioning data

• Detailed network information is needed to track devices in real-time.

• This information is necessary for the network infrastructure to track and trace a device in order to support communication.

• Since these data are usually very large, they are usually not stored/logged by mobile phone operators.

• Logged mobile positioning data are obtained by specific queries on these data with specific purposes in mind (e.g. billing or network analysis).

Locally collected sensor data

• A modern smartphone has over a dozen of sensors.

• A sensor is a piece of hardware to feed in data from the physical world.

• Sensors are needed to make a smartphone smart. For instance, how does my phone know when I change from portrait to landscape orientation? By its gyroscope.

• The sensors are used by the mobile operating system (Android, iOS, Windows Mobile), and by apps to do various things.

• Sensors are usually divided into 3 groups: motion/position, environmental, and location.

Motion/position sensors

1. Accelerometer measures the acceleration in m/s2 in each physical axis (x, y, z)

2. Gyroscope measures the rotation rate in rad/s around each physical axis (x, y, z)

3. Magnetometer measures the geomagnetic field in tesla (T) in each physical axis (x, y, z)

4. Proximity sensor measures the distance of an object to the screen in cm

Derived motion/position measurements

From these motion/position sensors, other measurements are derived:

• Gravity

• Linear acceleration

• Rotation

• Orientation

Environmental sensors

1. Light sensor measure the ambient light level (illumination) in lx

2. Barometer measures atmospheric pressure in hPa or mbar

3. Thermometer measures air temperature in degrees Celsius

4. Air humidity sensor measures the relative humidity in percent

5. Camera measures sight

6. Microphone measures sound

Note that sensors 2, 3, and 4 are only available in high-end smartphones.

Location sensors

1. Global Positioning System (GPS) determines geographic location from GPS satellites

2. Wi-Fi positioning system (WPS) determines geographic location from Wi-Fi network information

3. Mobile phone network data determines geographic location from mobile phone network from cell tower triangulation

4. Assisted GPS (A-GPS) (derived) determines the geographic location from GPS signal assisted with network information