Measurement-based Statistical Method for Estimating and Verifying Signal Coverage and Coverage Probability in Urban Microcells

Customer’s complaints and concerns about radio signal coverage at their home are important trigger to performance relevant drive test in the relevant area to observe the coverage quality. In this paper, statistical approach has been employed to assess the quality of the radio coverage and outage probability based on measured radio signals in an established UMTS network, operational in Ikoyi, a typical urban microcell in Nigerian environment. The results shows that the quality of radio signals at the cell edge is very poor in locations 2 and 4, as they recorded poor coverage probability performance of 89.25% and 81.72% and high outage probability performance of 10.74% and 18.28% respectively. It is also observed that the smaller the fade margin, the higher the outage probability and the lower the coverage reliability. This implies that the smaller the fade margin, the smaller the received signal strength at the MS and the more likely outage events. Hence, sufficient signal strength is needed at the mobile terminals at locations 2 and 4 in order to achieve the outage probability and coverage reliability required to effectively operate cellular communication networks.