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A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Mobile Internet Traffic in Public Transportation Systems: A View of Web Browsing from The Bus

Published: 11 September 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile devices are ubiquitous, and mobile-generated traffic is arguably a major component of today's web traffic. In particular, the use of smart-phones whilst commuting using public transport is a very popular and common practice in many countries. Mobile commuters however, often suffer from poor performance due to limited bandwidth and/or intermittent network coverage. This paper provides insights into the characteristics of web traffic generated by mobile commuters in these challenged conditions of public transportation systems. We use a dataset collected from 22 Inter-city Buses running on 6 different routes over 5 weeks in Sweden. By analyzing content similarity in time and across different routes, we discover a number of findings that reveal the existence of a spatio-temporal correlation of content popularity and that shed light on diurnal patterns of behavior of mobile commuters. We study popular content accessed by commuters and show that Social Networking and News content are predominant and are mutually exclusive. One of the salient findings is that mobile users' interest on buses is very concentrated, with 35% of the popular content solely accessed on a single day during the 5 weeks, and more than 70% of the popular content from a given day is accessed during one single hour of the day. We also observe high content similarity between specific routes which suggests that content caching within the bus can significantly improve user web experience. Our results indicate that based on the observed strong spatio-temporal correlation of content requests of mobile commuters, caching content inside the buses leads to a daily hit rate ranging from 10 to 20%, with a 20% savings of the daily bandwidth usage.

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  1. A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Mobile Internet Traffic in Public Transportation Systems: A View of Web Browsing from The Bus

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHANTS '15: Proceedings of the 10th ACM MobiCom Workshop on Challenged Networks
        September 2015
        74 pages
        ISBN:9781450335430
        DOI:10.1145/2799371
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Publication History

        Published: 11 September 2015

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        Author Tags

        1. mobile content distribution
        2. public transport
        3. spatial and temporal correlation

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        CHANTS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 27 submissions, 26%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 61 of 159 submissions, 38%

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        • (2024)Comprehensive Survey: Quality of Service in Railway Communication Using Information-Centric Networking and Light FidelityIEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems10.1109/TITS.2024.347269825:12(19218-19251)Online publication date: Dec-2024
        • (2021)A Comprehensive Survey on Moving NetworksIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2020.302900523:1(110-136)Online publication date: Sep-2022
        • (2020)Activity-Trip Based Model for Friend Recommendation with Transit Smart Card RecordsJournal of Urban Planning and Development10.1061/(ASCE)UP.1943-5444.0000624146:4Online publication date: Dec-2020
        • (2020)Investigating the Correlation between Activity Similarity and Trip Similarity of Public Transit Passengers Using Smart Card DataTransportation Research Procedia10.1016/j.trpro.2020.08.24948(2621-2637)Online publication date: 2020
        • (2019)uStash: A Novel Mobile Content Delivery System for Improving User QoE in Public TransportIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2018.285931818:6(1447-1460)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
        • (2019)Crowd-CacheComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2017.01.006100:C(104-117)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2019
        • (2017)Efficient Content Distribution in DOOH Advertising Networks Exploiting Urban Geo-Social ConnectivityProceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion10.1145/3041021.3051156(1363-1370)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
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        • (2016)uDrop: Pushing drop-box to the edge of mobile network2016 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerCom Workshops)10.1109/PERCOMW.2016.7457069(1-3)Online publication date: Mar-2016
        • (2016)TransFetch: A Viewing Behavior Driven Video Distribution Framework in Public Transport2016 IEEE 41st Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN.2016.27(147-155)Online publication date: Nov-2016
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