Urban gravity: a model for inter-city telecommunication flows
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Open Access
- 1 July 2009
- journal article
- letter
- Published by IOP Publishing in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment
- Vol. 2009 (07) , L07003
- https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2009/07/l07003
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.Keywords
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