A gravity model for inter-city telephone communication networks

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Abstract
In this paper, we consider a network of mobile phone customers aggregated by geographical proximity. We analyze the anonymous communications patterns of 2.5 million customers of a Belgian mobile phone operator. Grouping customers by billing address, we obtain a two-layer network. The lower layer - the microscopic network - is built from individual human-to-human communications. The upper layer - the macroscopic network - is built from 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 the city population sizes divided by the square of their distance.

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