Urban gravity: a model for inter-city telecommunication flows

Author(s)
Krings, Gautier; Calabrese, Francesco; Ratti, Carlo; Blondel, Vincent D.
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Abstract
We analyze the anonymous communication patterns of 2.5 million customers of a Belgian mobile phone operator. Grouping customers by billing address, we build a social network of cities that consists of communications between 571 cities in Belgium. We show that inter-city communication intensity is characterized by a gravity model: the communication intensity between two cities is proportional to the product of their sizes divided by the square of their distance.
Date issued
2009-07
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77162
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. SENSEable City Laboratory
Journal
Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Krings, Gautier et al. “Urban Gravity: a Model for Inter-city Telecommunication Flows.” Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2009.07 (2009): L07003.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISSN
1742-5468
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