2009 • Journal Article
Urban gravity: a model for inter-city telecommunication flows
Authors:
Krings, Gautier,
Calabrese, Francesco,
Ratti, Carlo,
Blondel, Vincent
Published in:
Journal Of Statistical Mechanics-theory And Experiment
We analyze the anonymous communication patterns of 2.5 million customers of a Belgian mobile phone operator. Grouping customers by billing address, we build a social network of cities that consists of communications between 571 cities in Belgium. We show that inter-city communication intensity is characterized by a gravity model: the communication intensity between two cities is proportional to the product of their sizes divided by the square of their distance.