A Comprehensive Survey of Cellular Network Performance from User’s Perspective: A Case Study in 0-km Spot of Yogyakarta

Abstract

Smart city issues have been a trending topic since the last three decades. Some aspects support the development of smart city included information and communication infrastructures where cellular networks play important roles. Maintaining or improving performance of cellular networks is one of the importance keys to keep their existence. Therefore, it cannot be avoided that cellular-networks operators (CNO) must measure their network performance. In the case of user perspectives, CNOs usually measure the performance by doing field measurements in standard procedures. The procedures mostly in quantitative manners. It is rare, the performance is measured in qualitative manners. Therefore, this paper provides additional qualitative methods for having a more comprehensive measurement of quality of service (QoS) as well as the quality of experience (QoE) of the cellular networks. This paper starts with a simulation of coverage with a ray tracing software in specific parameters to be used for field measurement. For the qualitative methods, a survey through questionnaire has been done to know what user opinions are about obtained services. The study chose the 0-km-spot of Yogyakarta which is known as one of the favorite tourism objects. The result shows, even though the signal strength is maintained stable better than -80dBm, SNR is fluctuating. While the survey shows that some potential network parameters still need to be upgraded to increase the user satisfaction level suggested by 25% of the respondents.