Performance Evaluation of Palestinian Mobile Networks Based on Crowdsourcing Measurements

The evaluation of mobile network performance involves assessing various key performance indicators (KPIs) that gauge the efficiency and effectiveness of these networks. The key performance indicators of the Palestinian mobile networks are usually monitored by the mobile network operators (MNOs) through their operation support subsystems and the carried-out drive tests. This include the received signal level, received signal quality, drop rate, handover success rate, packet loss, latency, throughput, etc. The Palestinian ministry of telecommunications and information technology (MTIT) together with the Palestinian Telecom Regulatory Authority (PTRA) also conduct performance measurements for the mobile networks through drive tests to monitor the quality of service (QoS) measurements delivered by each mobile operator and compare them with the standard KPIs benchmark limits. They aim to enhance user experience and network efficiency. However, these performance measurements either from the MNOs or the regulation agency are limited and do not reflect the exact end user experience. Therefore, in this paper, we address the performance evaluation of the Palestinian MNOs based on a large community of connected people smartphone crowdsourcing technique. Here, using smartphone crowdsourcing can collect continuous real-time data on network performance from a large number of smartphone users with various locations. Thus, the quality of experience (QoE) can be evaluated from the end user perspective with a bigger data set. In this paper, we have developed and implemented a smartphone application called “Signal Sense” for crowdsourced mobile network measurements. The performed measurements include location information, signal level, signal quality and throughput for 3G mobile networks in Palestine. The evaluation of these measurements reflects the relative performance of the Palestinian MNOs.