Investigating Call Drops with Field Measurements on Commercial Mobile Phones

One of the biggest problems nowadays for network operators are occurring call drops. This problem has been increasing in the last years specially since the advent of 3G. The investigation in the operator's network is very time intensive and due to the highly priced hardware only a few measurements can be done per day. In this paper we present a new methodology to investigate call drops by using mobile phones to do the measurements following the concept of citizen sensing. Therefore, a mobile application for Android is made that collects all necessary data and dumps the measurement results in a centralized database where the measurements are evaluated and represented on Google Maps. With a post analysis of the measurements, a classification of the call drops results is made. The collected data is also used to show some statistics related to the battery level and the received signal strength between mobile phone and network. This low cost variant of field testing is developed for call drops but could be used for any other parameter of interest.