Performance Assessment of HSDPA Networks From Outdoor Drive-Test Measurements

The introduction of high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) implies an enormous challenge for all mobile industry agents. All network operators must ensure complete availability of services by diligently planning and tuning their networks. Drive-test and call-tracing tools significantly help to assess the user plane performance but they can be also useful for troubleshooting potential problems in the cellular roll out. This paper offers some measurement results from an actual HSDPA network obtained with a conventional drive test tool in the campus of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Using these measurements a set of processing methods are proposed to detect some of the indicators of HSDPA performance degradation, such as poor coverage level, interfering coverage, pilot pollution, pilot overshooting, missing neighbors or pilot surprise. Application examples of all these methods are provided and analyzed.