How mobile phone handovers reflect urban mobility: A simulation study

We propose a novel way of estimating Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams (MFD) (or often also called Network Fundamental Diagrams) from mobile phone signaling data under the assumption that vehicles can be identified from the data stream. We run a simulation study to identify whether MFDs can be constructed from this type of data. We co-simulate the road traffic in Luxembourg City and one mobile operator's LTE network user plane, and show that mobile network base station clusters cover road network partitions of coherent behavior. Our results indicate that the relationships between handovers (flow) and attached phones (accumulation) in these base station clusters constitute MFDs. We validate our results by comparing the road network MFDs to the ones obtained from the mobile network.