Page 352 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2024

2024 ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference

study will lay the groundwork for further study in this area and QoS and mobile networks often struggle to meet 5G
which can be used by other countries as well. application requirements due to poor signal quality [27].
ii. Most coverage prediction maps are unreliable. The Federal Telecommunications companies need accurate mobile signal
Communications Commission (FCC) distributes annual strength estimates to optimize cell tower placement and
Broadband Deployment reports and shapefiles for telecom improve consumer connectivity [15]. For non-telecom
providers indicating their geographic coverage areas. experts, the statistics indicate the signal's quality as GREAT,
Scholars caution this data may be false. M. Nekrasov et al. GOOD, MODERATE and POOR.
[13] found that Pennsylvania's broadband connection is
considerably overestimated using Measurement Lab speed
tests. Network providers sometimes exaggerate coverage
with proprietary propagation models. Public systems for
evaluating coverage regions and signal strength, especially
in poor areas, are needed to assess mobile broadband
accessibility.
iii. The DoT, responsible for telecom policy formulation in
India, lacks an independent framework for signal quality
assessment. Hence developing this system was imperative.

5. PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

5.1 Development of the mobile application

5.1.1 National Telecom Volunteer - mobile application
Figure 5 - NTV application 'Signals tab’.
A smartphone application [24] was developed (Figure 4) to
serve as a crowdsourcing platform, as DoT lacked a 5.1.3 Data Captured by the App
preexisting mobile application for this. The app was The application uses the Work Manager component of the
designed for installation by volunteer citizens who are Android API to periodically collect the specified data
prepared to donate telecom-related data, despite the potential attributes (Table 1) in the background at 15-minute intervals.
impact on their mobile device's battery life and data The application provides users with the option to pause and
consumption.
resume background data collection at their convenience. To
This tool collects statistics on voice quality, data network motivate users, the application displays the total count of
quality, mobile base stations, and mobile phone hardware data samples collected, showing the user's contribution.
characteristics. This massive data gathering is intended to
cover all future research applications. Such crowdsourced Table 1 – Data captured by the NTV mobile application.
measures are more cost-effective and efficient for predicting
post-deployment coverage gaps caused by highway Signal Data Network Hardware Subscriber
construction or consumer residential preferences etc. [25].
Adjusting antenna tilt, height, and power or adding more Operator Downstream Manufacture Latitude
BTS addresses these coverage gaps, notably in the 5G [26]. Technology Bandwidth r
The NTV (National Telecom Volunteer) app was developed Signal strength
and released on Google Play on August 4, 2023. Channel No., Upstream Brand Longitude
Base Station Code, Bandwidth
Tracking Area Code
Cell ID, Location Interface name Model Timestamp
Area Code
Mobile Transport Type Product Other
Country/Network (Mobile/Wi-Fi) Network
code information

5.2 Server Architecture
A highly reliable architecture (Figure 6) has been used as a
backend server for the mobile application, which serves as
Figure 4 - NTV mobile application launched on Google the recipient of data pushed by the mobile application.
Play Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was used as the cloud
computing platform to host the databases. Ubuntu Linux
5.1.2 Feature of the App distribution v. 22.04.2 LTS is used as the operating system
The application displays to the user the mobile signals on the server. The live database of the mobile application
available on his/her mobile phone (Figure 5). The application utilizes Apache Cassandra version 4.0.10.
shows the telecom operator’s name. It also shows the Apache Hive version 3.1.2 database was installed as a data
telecom technology to which the system is latched whether warehouse to store historic old data. Apache Spark version
2G, 3G, 4G or 5G. Further, it displays the signal strength in 3.4.1 was installed for real-time batch processing of data to
dBm. Signal strength affects mobile network performance be fed to the Geospatial dashboard.

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