City-wide signal strength maps: Prediction with random forests

Abstract

Signal strength maps are of great importance to cellular providers for network planning and operation, however they are expensive to obtain and possibly limited or inaccurate in some locations. In this paper, we develop a prediction framework based on random forests to improve signal strength maps from limited measurements. First, we propose a random forests (RFs)-based predictor, with a rich set of features including location as well as time, cell ID, device hardware and other features. We show that our RFs-based predictor can significantly improve the tradeoff between prediction error and number of measurements needed compared to state-of-the-art data-driven predictors, i.e., requiring 80% less measurements for the same prediction accuracy, or reduces the relative error by 17% for the same number of measurements. Second, we leverage two types of real-world LTE RSRP datasets to evaluate into the performance of different prediction methods: (i) a small but dense Campus dataset, collected on a university campus and (ii) several large but sparser NYC and LA datasets, provided by a mobile data analytics company.