Community Cellular Networks Coverage Visualizer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a performance dashboard tool for community cellular networks that visualizes site coverage, performance, and reliability, aiding technicians, volunteers, and engineers in network management and planning.

Contribution

The paper presents a privacy-focused, interactive visualization platform for community cellular networks, enhancing network monitoring and site planning capabilities.

Findings

Improves network outage detection and site performance evaluation.

Facilitates optimal site placement and network reliability assessment.

Enhances transparency and trust in community cellular networks.

Abstract

The community cellular networks volunteers and researchers currently rarely have an access to information about the networks for each site. This makes it difficult for them to evaluate network performance, identify outrages and downtimes, or even to show the current site locations. In this paper, we propose the Community Cellular Networks Coverage Visualizer, a performance dashboard to help reduce the workload of technicians and gain trust from illustrating the reliability of the networks. The map displays the overall and in-depth performance for each current and future CCNs sites with privacy-focused implementation, while the multi-series line chart emphasizes on providing the capability of network overtime. Not only it will help users identify locations that have stronger and reliable signals nearby, but our applicaiton will also be an essential tool for volunteers and engineers to determine the optimal locations to install a new site and quickly identify possible network failures.