Impact of Indoor-Outdoor Context on Crowdsourcing based Mobile Coverage Analysis

Abstract

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.