Monitoring of Radio Networks Based on Terminal Measurements

The development of cellular mobile radio networks has received significant attention in the last few decades as mobility has become the most important issue in telecommunications. As a result, nowadays high speed mobile networks supply millions of subscribers around the world. However, user demands are getting higher and higher. Higher data rates and higher availability of the network are desired. During network deployment a lot of work is to be done to reach a setup which is close to the optimal one regarding the coverage of the system. Even an already deployed network may need configuration changes to keep availability in a sufficient state, due to the highly variable radio environment. Such method configuration will become more cumbersome with the ever increasing number of cells as a result of shrinking cell sizes in new generation networks. In this work, a modestly researched topic, the monitoring of radio networks based on terminal measurements is investigated in order to support auto-configuration methods. Methods, developed in this work may be applicable for instance in the 3GPP (3 Generation Partnership Project) Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. A system based positioning technique is proposed for binding terminal measurements to geographical locations in the network in order to find cell boundaries, determine cell sizes and detect coverage problems. Algorithms for these problems are described in detail. The principles of auto-configuration are addressed and a simple method, based on reference signal power adjustment is proposed. A non-location based monitoring technique is also described which is used to obtain decreased neighbor cell lists in the network. This technique is used to minimize the measurement burden on the mobile, and data traffic caused by the transmission of terminal measurements through both the radio and the core network. Performance results of the proposed techniques obtained through simulations using largescale and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation models, are shown which indicate the feasibility of the concept.