US 2001/0034208 A1Published application

Method and apparatus for co-channel interference measurements and base station color code decoding for drive tests in TDMA, cellular, and PCS networks

AssigneeDynamic Telecommunications, Inc.

InventorsPaul A. Kline, Sergey L. Dickey

Life of this patent

Estimating the term…

Loading patent…

Abstract

Co-channel interference in a wireless network is identified and quantified. Rather that using color code identification, a more reliable identification property of each co-channel component of the received composite signal is used, namely, the time of arrival of a known part of a signal. Detection and timing measurement is performed even in presence of stronger signals by focusing selectively on bursts having fixed contents (e.g., the FCCH burst used in GSM for frequency correction). The repetitive measurements of the time-of-arrival of each of the interfering components of the signal during a drive test enables determination of the geographical location of the interfering co-channel base stations.

Claims7

Dependent claims

A method of measuring co-channel interference in a wireless network, the method comprising:

receiving a composite signal including signals from plural base stations of the wireless network;
correlating the received composite signal with an a prior known burst waveform;
registering all correlation peaks found as a result of correlating as distinct components in a result database;
determining, for each component, if it is a new instance of a component already acquired during previous measurements, or if it is a new component;
in the event that a component is determined to be a new instance of a component already acquired during previous measurements, assigning to that component an old identifier consistent with previous instances of the same component;
in the event that a component is determined to be a new component, assigning to that component a new identifier;
determining, for each component, its relative power by the height of its respective correlation peak;
log relative power data into the result database for all of the components;
determining, for each component, its time-of-arrival relative to a time-base reference;
and
log time-of-arrival data into the result database for all of the components.

8 more elements

An apparatus for making co-channel interference measurements, the apparatus comprising:

an antenna array having a steerable null;
an RF receiver connected to the antenna array to receive a composite signal, the RF receiver producing RF data;
a GPS receiver generating coordinate data;
a processor connected to receive the RF data from the RF receiver and the coordinate data from the GPS receiver;
and
a database storage device connected to the processor;
wherein the processor is further connected to the antenna array and generates control signals to control the steerable null so as to nullify a dominant received component from the composite signal so as to enable other received components of the composite signal passed through as the RF data to be quantified as co-channel data by the processor;
and
wherein the processor records the quantified co-channel data and the coordinate data in the database storage device.

6 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.