Increasingly, geographic information systems are playing a greater role in the field of telecommunications with respect to inventory, network design, device deployment and overall systems monitoring. Southern California Edison has developed a 900 Mhz wireless communications network utilizing packet radio technology. To date, the network is comprised of over 20,000 radios connected to more than 90,000 end devices. In an effort to manage this system, Edison developed the NetComm End User GIS Application (NEUGA), an Arc/Plot-based customized application designed to answer complex and wide-ranging ad hoc spatial analysis queries posed by a disparate user group. The network planners employ line-of-sight analysis, network density analysis and shortest path analysis and network operations engineers utilize NEUGA for visualizing packet tracing, cul de sac analysis, RF load density, and a variety of other spatial analysis tasks. This paper outlines the project design, the many obstacles encountered, and critical evaluation of the project following 2 years of implementation including an analysis of the enterprise-wide benefits.
The dramatic increase in the demand for wireless services and personal communications imposes a modern voice-data mobile radio system to be characteirised by two main requirements: 1) it has to be able to provide a high subscriber capacity, 2) it has to guarantee a good radio propagation coverage and minimising, at the same time, the potential co-channel and adjacent channel interference contributions. In order to achieve these goals, a mobile network design has to face and to overcome several problems: users mobility, limited availability of the resources (radio channels) and the characteristics of the terrain orography. Even though with different approaches and different criteria for the estimation of system parameters, all modern planning methods use computer programs. The purpose of this paper is to present a versatile software planning tool (RASPUTIN, RAdio Strength Prediction Using Territorial INputs) that, using the capabilities offered by GIS technology (ArcInfo), allows to design and continuously update a mobile cellular network, on the basis of the knowledge of digital altimetry, integrated with typical land usage information, such as urbanisation and vegetation, obtained from different sources, i.e maps digitisation, aerial photography, satellite remote sensing.