Efficient Interactive Global Cellular Signal Strength Visualization

As a typical big data representative, the information of global Cellular Signal Strength (CSS), defined as the signal power received by mobile phones, plays an important role in geographic flow analysis, because the density of such information can reflect the urbanization variables such as population, gross domestic product, built-up area, electric power consumption, and etc. Despite the importance, the real-time analysis of global CSS distribution remains a challenging problem due to the large data scale. In this paper, a Display-driven Computing (DisDC) technique is designed and applied to provide efficient large scale interactive CSS visualization, generating results by calculating the value of each pixel that directly for display that can dramatically improve system capacity in big data handling. Specifically, we present an efficient CSS measurement algorithm, which introduces spatial indexes and a corresponding query strategy; besides, an optimized parallel computing architecture is proposed to ensure the ability of real-time visualization. Experiments show that our approach obviously outperforms traditional methods and is capable of handling more than 40 million base stations in real-time. Moreover, an online demonstration is provided at https://github.com/MemoryMmy/CSSMap.