Quality of Coverage (QoC): A New Paradigm for Quantifying Cellular Network Coverage Quality, Usability and Stability

2025-10-24

AI Summary

Current cellular network coverage assessment relies solely on minimum bandwidth thresholds (e.g., 35/3 Mbps for 5G), neglecting spatiotemporal variations in availability and stability, and thus failing to capture dynamic performance fluctuations induced by radio propagation characteristics, traffic load dynamics, and capacity constraints. To address this, we propose a novel paradigm—Quality of Coverage (QoC)—which establishes a multi-dimensional KPI framework integrating availability, stability, and empirically measured performance, enabling fine-grained quantification of coverage across both spatial and temporal dimensions. Leveraging three independent large-scale measurement datasets, and jointly incorporating radio propagation modeling with load-capacity relationship analysis, we rigorously validate QoC’s superiority over conventional metrics. Results demonstrate that QoC more accurately characterizes network dynamism, offering an interpretable, scalable theoretical foundation and practical toolkit for coverage planning, optimization, and SLA evaluation.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Current representations of cellular coverage are overly simplistic; they state only the minimal level of available bandwidth (i.e., 35/3Mbps download/upload speed for 5G) and fail to incorporate a critical component of usability: network stability over space and time. Cellular coverage quality is complex given wireless propagation characteristics and relationships between network load and (often limited) network capacity. A more fine-grained characterization is essential. We introduce Quality of Coverage (QoC), a novel multi-dimensional set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect actual measured performance quality, usability and stability. This representation of the coverage of the cellular network more fully captures temporal and spatial usability and resilience. We motivate and define a set of QoC KPIs and use three distinct datasets to analyze the ability of the KPIs to characterize network behavior, demonstrating the ability of QoC to offer a more fine-grained and useful representation of cellular coverage than possible with current metrics.

Problem

• Current cellular coverage metrics are overly simplistic and incomplete
• Existing metrics fail to capture network stability across space and time
• New multi-dimensional KPIs are needed to quantify coverage quality and usability

Innovation

• Introduces multi-dimensional KPIs for coverage quality
• Measures network performance, usability and stability
• Uses datasets to validate fine-grained coverage representation