Big Data Processing, Analysis and Applications in Mobile Cellular Networks

When coupled with spatio-temporal context, location-based
data collected in mobile cellular networks provide insights into patterns
of human activity, interactions, and mobility. Whilst uncovered patterns
have immense potential for improving services of telecom providers as
well as for external applications related to social wellbeing, its inherent
massive volume make such ’Big Data’ sets complex to process. A sig-
nificant number of studies involving such mobile phone data have been
presented, but there still remain numerous open challenges to reach tech-
nology readiness. They include efficient access in privacy-preserving man-
ner, high performance computing environments, scalable data analytics,
innovative data fusion with other sources–all finally linked into the appli-
cations ready for operational mode. In this chapter, we provide a broad
overview of the entire workflow from raw data access to the final appli-
cations and point out the critical challenges in each step that need to
be addressed to unlock the value of data generated by mobile cellular
networks.