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

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.