Verifying Measurements of Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) on LTE Network using an App on Android Smartphones

RF engineers use drive test systems and equipment to measure the characteristics of cellular networks as a part of their everyday work. Their tasks include planning, performance monitoring, optimization, etc. A fundamental Long Term Evolution (LTE) performance measurement is the Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP). Measurements of RSRP are taken using either smartphones, receivers or channel scanners. The RSRP is considered as the fundamental coverage metric in an L TE network. This paper describes an Android application (LTENetScan) that enables RSRP measurement and logging. A comparison is made between RSRP measurements taken by LTENetScan on phones from different manufacturers with the same data captured by a professional-grade scanner. This comparison validates the accuracy of the phone-based systems as well as their feasibility as alternative test drive systems.