Telco Big Data Research and Open Problems

Abstract

A telecommunication company (telco) is traditionally only perceived as the entity that provides telecommunication services, such as telephony and data communication access to users. However, the radio and backbone infrastructure of such entities spanning densely most urban spaces and widely most rural areas, provides nowadays a unique opportunity to collect immense amounts of data that capture a variety of natural phenomena on an ongoing basis, e.g., traffic, commerce, mobility patterns and user service experience. The ability to perform analytics on the generated big data within tolerable elapsed time and share it with key smart city enablers (e.g., municipalities, public services, startups, authorities, and companies), elevates the role of telcos in the realm of future smart cities from pure network access providers to information providers. In this tutorial, we overview the state-of-the-art in telco big data analytics by focusing on a set of basic principles, namely: (i) real-time analytics and detection

(ii) experience, behavior and retention analytics

(iii) privacy

and (iv) storage. We also present experiences from developing an innovative such architecture and conclude with open problems and future directions.