Mobile Coverage in Curitiba, Brazil: Methodology for Measuring the Quality of Services Using LTE

摘要

Curitiba is a city in south Brazil with an estimated population of 1.8 million inhabitants [3]. The teledensity in this city is over 1.2 cellular for each person and, four players, actually are working with Long Term Evolution (LTE) in the city. However, the quality of the LTE cell coverage has not yet reached the standard of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) group. Considering the growing demand for better quality of service provided by telecom operators, this study aims to develop a methodology for analyzing the quality of cellular LTE coverage in Curitiba that can easily be extended to any other big city in Brazil, since we consider a dense urban region, in the frequency range of 2600 MHz and a bandwidth of 20 MHz. The methodology includes conducting a proper drive test in a commercial network with the processing of data obtained through the commercial software, as well as developing a spreadsheet to perform a theoretical project for the purpose of comparing and validating the methodology.