Human mobility has a strong impact on the spread of epidemics To control an epidemic, mobility restrictions are enforced in areas that are identified as 'hotspots' of disease To ensure strict compliance of restrictions, authorities need to track the movement of people within the hotspots, and data from Base Stations (BSs) serving the hotspots can be potentially used for this purpose However, tracking movement within a hotspot defined by strict boundaries is hard using BSs data, as the radio signals do not obey physical boundaries, i e , BSs in a given region may also serve mobiles outside the region Hence buffer-zones are defined around the regions of interest so that boundaries of the region are suitably expanded to minimize false alarms In this work, we develop a method for the creation of buffer-zones using the Voronoi Tessellation method that is widely used to analyze spatial distributions of BSs We develop a software tool that implements our algorithms and demonstrates its effectiveness © 2021 IEEE
Monitoring COVID Hotspots Using Telecom Data: Voronoi Tessellations for Marking Buffer Zones