Analyzing signal strength versus quality levels in cellular systems: A case study in GSM

The authors propose a new tool to analyze the performance of a cellular base station. The analysis is based on the joint processing of the received power and quality measurements, both in the uplink (UL) and the downlink (DL). These measurements are originally designed for power control and handover purposes. The main objective of the paper is to fully describe and, therefore, to detect situations involving abnormal interference levels in UL and DL. These situations can be a consequence of a malfunctioning of the power control algorithm, a bad radio optimization and planning or the presence of an outer interference, among others. The novel tool proposed is valid for any cellular system, in this paper we focus on its application to GSM/GPRS system to illustrate its benefits. We include some experiments where real cell data recordings were analyzed.