A NEW MOBILE APPLICATION FOR PHYSICAL MEASUREMENT IN A CELLULAR NETWORK

Year 2020, Issue: 045, 178 - 200, 31.12.2020

Aygün Varol Bilge Kartal Çetin

Abstract

Mobile cellular network operators make network parameter measurements called 'driving test' at regular intervals to understand the service quality and plan the network capacity. In order to reduce the man power and the cost required for the driving test, these measurements can be obtained with a mobile application which runs on the user equipment. Moreover, end user measurements of the cellular network parameters can be used to improve network performance in many ways, such as troubleshooting problems in network or determining the number and capacity of base stations.
In this paper, existing smartphone applications for network parameter measurement in the literature has been investigated and a new Andoid based application CoverME (Coverage of My Environment) has been developed. CoverME provides all the measurements performed by existing applications and supports four more additional measurements. The developed application makes the measurement accuracy to be analyzed with the help of the return time (RTT-round trip time) parameter and monitor the battery level. In addition, it limits the energy consumption as it is designed to operate in a semi-autonomous. CoverME keeps a record that contains key performance parameters of LTE communication systems; RSRP, RSRQ, RSSI, CQI values. These values matched with cell ID, download speed, latency and current location for the consistency of the application. As a case study, the measurements were made on a route determined in Isparta province with the developed application. Utilizing obtained measurements, the relationship of these values with each other and the relationship with the download speed were examined.

Keywords

LTE, Android, Measurement Application, RSRP, RSRQ, RSSI, CQI, Download Speed

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