The relationship between official estimates of UK residential and workday population density and the density of mobile phone cell-towers is investigated using freely available and open-sourced data on cell-tower locations from OpenCellID.
This repository contains the code used to generate figures and analysis used in the publication !!!placeholder.
- Part 1: the relationship between official estimates of UK residential and workday population density and the density of mobile phone cell-towers is investigated.
- Part 2: using the cell-tower location measurements and the ggmap library, a density estimation technique is used to make inferences about the underlying probability density functions.
- Part 3: timeliness and frequency of update of the OpenCellID data is investigated.
R libraries required:
- reshape2
- dplyr
- ggplot2
- ggmap
Repository structure:
.
├── analysis
│ ├── Part_1_Analysis.Rmd
│ └── Part_2_KDE.Rmd
│ └── Part_3_APPENDIX-B.Rmd
│ └── utils.R
├── reports
│ └── part1
│ ├── README.md
│ └── figures
│ └── part2
│ ├── README.md
│ └── figures
│ └── part3
│ ├── README.md
│ └── figures
└── execute.R
└── data.Rdata
analysisfolder contains the R files used for the analysis.reportscontains the files generated by the report, subdivided in 3 directories: part1, part2, part3..mdfiles for easy to see code and output resultsfiguresdirectories contains the generated figures for the publication
data.Rdatadata used in the analysisexecute.Ris the R script to be run from the repository folder to re-generate all the analysis and reports files
The data used for this project were downloaded from the OpenCellID database on 16 January 2017.
A detailed description of the data is presented in the table below. For more details refer to the publication in the Useful links section
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| radio | Network type. One of the strings GSM, UMTS, LTE or CDMA. |
| mcc | Mobile Country Code (UK: 234, 235) |
| net | Mobile Network Code (MNC) |
| area | Location Area Code (LAC) for GSM and UMTS networks. Tracking Area Code (TAC) for LTE networks. Network IDenfitication number (NID) for CDMA networks |
| cell | Cell ID |
| unit | Primary Scrambling Code (PSC) for UMTS networks. Physical Cell ID (PCI) for LTE networks. An empty value for GSM and CDMA networks |
| lon | Longitude in degrees between -180.0 and 180.0 If changeable=1: average of longitude values of all related measurements. If changeable=0: exact GPS position of the cell tower |
| lat | Latitude in degrees between -90.0 and 90.0 If changeable=1: average of latitude values of all related measurements. If changeable=0: exact GPS position of the tower |
| range | Estimate of cell range, in meters. |
| samples | Total number of measurements assigned to the cell tower |
| changeable | Defines if coordinates of the cell tower are exact or approximate. |
| created | The first time when the cell tower was seen and added to the OpenCellID database. |
| updated | The last time when the cell tower was seen and update. |
| averageSignal | Average signal strength from all assigned measurements for the cell. |
Additional details regarding the analysis and the results of the study can be found here
Susan Williams and Alessandra Sozzi, working for the Office for National Statistics Big Data project
Released under the MIT License.