Using LTE Power Headroom Report for Coverage Optimization

This paper describes how LTE Rel´ 8 power headroom report (PHR) can be used to detect outage problems in LTE networks. The paper outlines the proposed minimization of drive tests use case for PH triggered measurements, alleviates the problems in this proposal, and describes improvements which can help operators to gather more coverage and outage related information from their networks. The article points out, that the earlier proposal can lead to unnecessary signaling, it does not work always as supposed, and the existing measurements can be used to gather the same information. The study is conducted by simulating two different outage problem scenarios with a fully dynamic LTE system simulator.