An Analysis Tool On Grid Based Coverage Performance Of Cellular Networks:Design And Implementation

Mobile communication network is a dynamic network. In the process of network operation,there will be some changes that aren’t able to be considered at the beginning of network planning,such as changes in propagation environment, traffic load as well as the quality of service. All of these changes of network need to be detected and analysed. In fact, there have been a number of methods in network test and analysis field, such as call quality test and drive test, and so on. But most of the methods are more conventional. And it also require relatively more time and resources since they can’t run automatically.According to network operator’s needs, this paper develops an analysis tool on the coverage performance of cellular network based on geographic grid. This tool has capacity of detecting and locating network problems more efficiently as well as proposing suggestions for network improvement. At first, calls records generated in the process of calling can be extracted and calculated to get some useful indicators such as the location and Ec/Io of the call. Then signal quality and traffic load in 100m*100m size of grids can be counted and computed. Secondly the tool can analyse individually signal quality and traffic load of all grids and get weak coverage region and high traffic load region in this area respectively. At the same time, we can use the display module of geographic grids to show the layout of signal quality and traffic load geographically. At last, it can combine the two things and find the target grids that coexists weak coverage and high traffic load. What’s more, it can classify the target grids so that it can take different strategy for different type of target grids to improve their performance.The tool has been experienced by actual calls records from network operator. It can be set different parameters for different demands and generate grid PNGs of weak coverage or high traffic load so that we can analyse the condition of cellular network intuitively. As well as the target grids will be analysed until the suggestions for network optimization are proposed.