Planet-scale Human Mobility Measurement

TL;DR

This paper advocates for collecting large-scale human mobility data from billions of people to advance research in mobile systems, epidemiology, and other fields, emphasizing its potential societal benefits.

Contribution

It highlights the need for planet-scale mobility datasets and challenges the community to develop methods for large-scale data collection.

Findings

Current datasets are limited to 100 nodes with sparse connectivity.

Large-scale mobility data can significantly improve epidemic modeling.

Collecting such data could impact multiple academic disciplines.

Abstract

Research into, and design and construction of mobile systems and algorithms requires access to large-scale mobility data. Unfortunately, the wireless and mobile research community lacks such data. For instance, the largest available human contact traces contain only 100 nodes with very sparse connectivity, limited by experimental logistics. In this paper we pose a challenge to the community: how can we collect mobility data from billions of human participants? We re-assert the importance of large-scale datasets in communication network design, and claim that this could impact fundamental studies in other academic disciplines. In effect, we argue that planet-scale mobility measurements can help to save the world. For example, through understanding large-scale human mobility, we can track and model and contain the spread of epidemics of various kinds.