Drive test analysis to optimization of a live UMTS network

Description

Abstract As digital communications networks grow in use and size throughout the world, the need for accurate, reliable test and measurement procedures has increased tremendously. Providing network coverage and quality of service(QoS) is an important task of a cellular networ coperator. This is because cellular spectrum is normally licensed under certain coverage obligations, and operators need to be competitive in market. To improve their networks, operators often send engineers in the field to collect radio measurements, to discover problems such as coverage holes in the network, and to determine whether certain parameter tuning is needed. Even though mobile radio systems deliver more and more performance data, there is always a need to measure the performance of the network in the field. These measurements can either be part of the deploying new network sites in order to meet coverage, capacity and quality requirements, optimization of the network, benchmarking of performance, troubleshooting, or to verify the performance after an upgrade or reconfiguration of the network. These measurements are performed through Drive Test and RFsurvey. Drive testing is principally applied in both the planning and optimization stage of network development. This report focuses on the procedure of drive test and its importance in network planning and Optimization.