Introduction of Measurement-Based Estimation of Handover Attempts for Automatic Planning of Mobile Radio Networks

The complexity of current mobile radio networks (GERAN, UTRAN) has raised a demand for automatic planning procedures and a call for self-planning in future systems (LTE second phase). However, for any kind of automatism, reliable input data is necessary and, among other things, derivable from measurements of statistical counters collected by the operation and maintenance centre (OMC). Mobility information is required by planning procedures concerning registration areas, handover (HO) parameters, etc., in particular, and can mainly be derived from HO statistics. For a new network plan, this information has to be estimated. In this paper, an estimation method for HO attempts based on corresponding HO measurements from the network in operation is proposed. The associated model is based on graphs representing the interdependency of cells. The order of neighbourhood is introduced as a weight function for the edges. For appropriate weighting during estimation a general Pareto probability density function is determined from HO measurements. The analysis of the estimation performance is carried out by comparing the estimation values with corresponding OMC measurement data. Both the required network data and the OMC measurement data are provided by a real network.