Mobile radio network management supported by a planning tool

The rapid development of mobile radio networks confronts the operators with serious problems in the planning and management of their networks. Due to the nature of the medium a number of new tasks appears if compared with fixed networks. Especially for a GSM network a large number of parameters related to the radio interface have to be planned and optimized. The effect of parameter settings is not limited to single or connected network elements but may extend over the whole area of radio coverage. This is strongly influencing the quality of the network. So planning and operation staff have to be equipped with tools that can deal with the visualization of information in a geographical context. In this paper we present two important tasks in the management of mobile radio network and how they are supported by software tools. The first task can be described as the optimization and management of radio networks based on measurement data. The second one is aimed of analyzing and checking of the parameters of the base station subsystem. To support both tasks considerable visualizations, an advanced data management and an easy understandable user interface are needed. An evaluation of different approaches to provide a software tool for these tasks was carried out. It resulted in the decision to enhance T-Mobil's own radio network planning tool Pegasos with the needed functionality. The paper is organized in three parts. An introduction gives a motivation for the use of computer-based tools. It also explains the support of Pegasos for some of the main tasks of radio network planning and describes the design goals of the tool that finally led to the decision to use it as a software platform. The next parts of the paper describe the new applications in some detail. For the measurement data application the connection between planning and optimization is explained, the different data sources are visited, and the possible evaluations of the gathered data are discussed. The section on the BSS-parameter application describes where these parameters are initialized and optimized. It also explains the possible check that can be applied to the parameters. Finally the process of reconfiguration and integration of the parameters is considered.