The fallacy of the closest antenna: Towards an adequate view of device location in the mobile network

TL;DR

This paper challenges the common assumption that cell tower Voronoi polygons accurately represent device locations, showing significant location uncertainty and overlap that impact privacy and mobility studies.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that cell tower Voronoi polygons are unreliable for precise device location estimation, highlighting the need to reconsider spatial assumptions in mobile network analysis.

Findings

Over 60% of connections place devices outside the tower's Voronoi polygon.

To cover 90% of possible device locations, adjacent Voronoi rings must be included.

Location uncertainty undermines assumptions about device identification from minimal connection data.

Abstract

The partition of the Mobile Phone Network (MPN) service area into the cell towers' Voronoi polygons (VP) may serve as a coordinate system for representing the location of the mobile phone devices. This view is shared by numerous papers that exploit mobile phone data for studying human spatial mobility. We investigate the credibility of this view by comparing volunteers' locational data of two kinds: (1) Cell towers' that served volunteers' connections and (2) The GPS tracks of the users at the time of connection. In more than 60\% of connections, user's mobile device was found outside the VP of the cell tower that served for the connection. We demonstrate that the area of possible device's location is many times larger than the area of the cell tower's VP. To comprise 90\% of the possible locations of the devices that may be connected to the cell tower one has to consider the tower's VP together with the two rings of the VPs adjacent to the tower's VPs. An additional, third, ring of the adjacent VPs is necessary to comprise 95\% of possible locations of the devices that can be connected to a cell tower. The revealed location uncertainty is in the nature of the MPN structure and service and entail essential overlap between the cell towers' service areas. We discuss the far-reaching consequences of this uncertainty in regards to the estimating of locational privacy and urban mobility. Our results undermine today's dominant opinion that an adversary, who obtains the access to the database of the Call Detail Records maintained by the MPN operator, can identify a mobile device without knowing its number based on a very short sequence of time-stamped field observations of the user's connection.