Comparing densities of mobile cell towers with population estimates

The relationship between official estimates of UK residential and workday population density and the density of mobile phone cell-towers is investigated using freely available and open-sourced data on cell-tower locations from OpenCellID.

This repository contains the code used to generate figures and analysis used in the publication !!!placeholder.

• Part 1: the relationship between official estimates of UK residential and workday population density and the density of mobile phone cell-towers is investigated.
• Part 2: using the cell-tower location measurements and the ggmap library, a density estimation technique is used to make inferences about the underlying probability density functions.
• Part 3: timeliness and frequency of update of the OpenCellID data is investigated.

How do I use it?

Requirements/Pre-requisites

R libraries required:

• reshape2
• dplyr
• ggplot2
• ggmap

Project Structure

Repository structure:

.
├── analysis
│   ├── Part_1_Analysis.Rmd
│   └── Part_2_KDE.Rmd
│   └── Part_3_APPENDIX-B.Rmd
│   └── utils.R
├── reports
│   └── part1
│     ├── README.md
│     └── figures
│   └── part2
│     ├── README.md
│     └── figures
│   └── part3
│     ├── README.md
│     └── figures
└── execute.R
└── data.Rdata

• analysis folder contains the R files used for the analysis.
• reports contains the files generated by the report, subdivided in 3 directories: part1, part2, part3.
  • .md files for easy to see code and output results
  • figures directories contains the generated figures for the publication
• data.Rdata data used in the analysis
• execute.R is the R script to be run from the repository folder to re-generate all the analysis and reports files

Data

The data used for this project were downloaded from the OpenCellID database on 16 January 2017.

A detailed description of the data is presented in the table below. For more details refer to the publication in the Useful links section

Parameter	Description
radio	Network type. One of the strings GSM, UMTS, LTE or CDMA.
mcc	Mobile Country Code (UK: 234, 235)
net	Mobile Network Code (MNC)
area	Location Area Code (LAC) for GSM and UMTS networks. Tracking Area Code (TAC) for LTE networks. Network IDenfitication number (NID) for CDMA networks
cell	Cell ID
unit	Primary Scrambling Code (PSC) for UMTS networks. Physical Cell ID (PCI) for LTE networks. An empty value for GSM and CDMA networks
lon	Longitude in degrees between -180.0 and 180.0 If changeable=1: average of longitude values of all related measurements. If changeable=0: exact GPS position of the cell tower
lat	Latitude in degrees between -90.0 and 90.0 If changeable=1: average of latitude values of all related measurements. If changeable=0: exact GPS position of the tower
range	Estimate of cell range, in meters.
samples	Total number of measurements assigned to the cell tower
changeable	Defines if coordinates of the cell tower are exact or approximate.
created	The first time when the cell tower was seen and added to the OpenCellID database.
updated	The last time when the cell tower was seen and update.
averageSignal	Average signal strength from all assigned measurements for the cell.

Useful links

Additional details regarding the analysis and the results of the study can be found here

Contributors

Susan Williams and Alessandra Sozzi, working for the Office for National Statistics Big Data project

LICENSE

Released under the MIT License.