iVESTA: An Interactive Visualization and Evaluation System for Drive Test Data

Drive Test Data (DTD) evaluation intends to provide first-hand mobile phone performance assessment such that different parties, including phone manufacturers and network providers, can review the phone and network performance, e.g., service coverage and voice quality, from different perspectives. Due to many uncertainties involved in the test environments, e.g., terrain, interference, vehicle speed, and network delay, it is crucial to properly digest the DTD data such that users can draw valid conclusions like "phone A outperforms phone B in the suburb area". We argue that because of the inherent complexity of the test environments, DTD collected from the fields suffer from low quality, low integrity, high uncertainty, and low interpretability. An evaluation tool should consider all such reality issues in order to develop a practical product. For this purpose, we report, in this paper, an integrative data visualization system WESTA (interactive Visualization and Evaluation System for driven Test dAta) for iDEN (integrated Digital Enhanced Network [1]) drive test data. Our objective is to project high dimensional DTD data onto well-organized web pages, such that users can visually study phone performance with respect to different factors. iVESTA employs a web-based architecture which enables users to upload DTD and immediately visualize the test results and observe phone and network performances with respect to factors such as dropped call rate, signal quality, vehicle speed, handover and network delays. iVESTA provides a practical test environment for phone manufacturers and network service providers to perform comprehensive study on their products from the real-world DTD.