Impact of Indoor-Outdoor Context on Crowdsourcing based Mobile Coverage Analysis
Mahesh K. Marina, Valentin Radu, Konstantinos Balampekos · 2015
We consider the crowdsourcing based mobile cellular network measurement paradigm that is becoming increasingly popular. In particular, we aim to study the impact of user indoor/outdoor environment context at time of measurement. Focusing on signal strength as the measurement metric and using a real large crowdsourced measurement dataset for central London area along with estimated environment state (indoor or outdoor), we show that indoor-outdoor context has a significant impact, suggesting that conflating indoor and outdoor measurements can lead to unreliable results. We validate these observations using a set of diverse and controlled measurements with indoor/outdoor ground truth information. We also discuss some opportunities for future work (e.g., accurate and efficient context detection) relevant to crowdsourced mobile network measurement systems.