Quality of Coverage (QoC): Quantifying Cellular Network Coverage Quality, Usability and Stability

TL;DR

This paper introduces Quality of Coverage (QoC), a comprehensive set of KPIs that measure cellular network performance, usability, and stability over space and time, addressing limitations of existing coverage maps.

Contribution

The paper presents QoC, a novel multi-dimensional framework for assessing cellular coverage quality, validated with over 15 million measurements from a real network.

Findings

QoC KPIs accurately reflect network behavior at various locations.

QoC effectively characterizes real-world network performance.

Coverage quality varies significantly across geographic regions.

Abstract

Characterizing cellular network performance is complex. Current representations of cellular coverage, such as service provider and FCC coverage maps, focus only on the minimal level of available bandwidth (e.g., 35/3Mbps download/upload speed for 5G) and omit critical dimensions of quality: network usability and stability over space and time. Because cellular performance can vary substantially along both dimensions, a more fine-grained characterization is necessary. We introduce Quality of Coverage (QoC), a novel multi-dimensional set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that capture measured temporal and spatial performance quality, usability and stability. To evaluate QoC, we first analyze whether the QoC KPIs accurately reflect expected network behavior at individual locations and across spatially-aggregated regions. Then, we apply QoC to more than 15 million measurements from a production network to evaluate its ability to characterize real-world network behavior. Together, our results demonstrate the need for KPIs that capture the full spectrum of cellular performance and show how QoC enables rigorous evaluation of coverage quality across multiple geographic scales.