LPWAN Coverage Assessment Planning Without Explicit Knowledge of Base Station Locations

An assessment of radio network coverage, usually in the form of a measurement campaign, is essential for multibase-station (multi-BS) network deployment and maintenance. It can be conducted by a network operator or its served consumers. However, the number of measurement points and their locations may not be known in advance for an efficient and accurate evaluation. The main goal of this study is to propose a new methodology for understanding the selection of measurement points during coverage and signal quality assessment. It is particularly tailored to multi-BS low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) deployments without explicit knowledge of BS locations. To this aim, we first conduct a large-scale measurement campaign for three popular LPWAN technologies, namely, narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), Sigfox, and LoRaWAN. Utilizing this baseline data, we develop a procedure for identifying the minimum set of measurement points for the coverage assessment with a given accuracy as well as study which interpolation algorithms produce the lowest approximation error. Our results demonstrate that a random choice of measurement points is on par with their deterministic selection. Out of the candidate interpolation algorithms, the Kriging method offers attractive performance in terms of the absolute error for NB-IoT deployments. In contrast, for Sigfox and LoRaWAN infrastructures, less complex techniques, such as the natural neighbor, linear interpolation, or inverse-distance weighting, can achieve comparable (and occasionally even better) accuracy levels.