Impact of inaccurate user and base station positioning on autonomous coverage estimation

Autonomous monitoring of key performance indicators, which are obtained from measurement reports, is well established as a necessity for enabling self-organising networks. However, this reports are usually tagged with geographical location information which are obtained from positioning techniques and are therefore prone to errors. In this paper, we investigate the impact position estimation errors on the cell coverage probability that can be estimated from autonomous coverage estimation (ACE). We derive novel and accurate expressions of the actual cell coverage probability of such scheme while considering: errors in user equipment (UE) location and; errors in both UE and base station location. We present generic expressions for channel modelled with path-loss and shadowing, and much simplified expressions for the path-loss dominant channel model. Our results reveal that the ACE scheme will be suboptimal as long as there are errors in the reported geographical location information. Hence, appropriate coverage margins must be considered when utilising ACE.