Quality of Coverage (QoC): Quantifying Cellular Network Coverage Quality, Usability and Stability
For network operators and regulators, QoC provides a more nuanced method to evaluate cellular coverage quality beyond minimal bandwidth thresholds.
The paper introduces Quality of Coverage (QoC), a multi-dimensional set of KPIs that capture temporal and spatial performance, usability, and stability of cellular networks, addressing the limitations of existing coverage maps. Evaluation on over 15 million measurements shows QoC effectively characterizes real-world network behavior across geographic scales.
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.