Call detail records to characterize usages and mobility events of phone users

Cellular technologies are evolving quickly to constantly adapt to new usage and tolerate the load induced by the increasing number of phone applications. Understanding the mobile traffic is thus crucial to refine models and improve experiments. In this context, one has to understand the temporal activity of a user and the user movements. At the user scale, the usage is not only defined by the amount of calls but also by the user's mobility. At a higher level, the base stations have a key role on the quality of service. In this paper, we analyze a very large Call Detail Records (CDR) over 12 months in Mexico. It contains 8 millions users and 5 billions of call events. Our first contribution is the study call duration and inter-arrival time parameters. Then, we assess user movements between consecutive calls (switching from a station to another one). Our study suggests that user mobility is pretty dependent on user activity. Furthermore, we show properties of the inter-call mobility by making an analysis of the call distribution.