Patent ID: 9571336
Date: 2017-02-14
CPC Classifications: H04L,H04W

Claim:
1. A method, comprising: receiving, from a user equipment operating in a communications network, information identifying and characterizing one or more communication failures affecting the user equipment, wherein each communication failure is a radio link failure or a handover failure, wherein the information relating to the one or more communications failures includes positional information of a user equipment affected by one or more of the radio link failures, and wherein the information relating to the one or more communication failures comprises detection of an increase in frequency of communication failures; for each communication failure, identifying each of one or more cells involved in the radio link failure, each cell defined by a base station; and analyzing the information relating to the communication failures to detect coverage holes in the communications network and to determine the location of each coverage hole, wherein determination of the location is based at least in part on operational parameters comprising one or more of handover failure statistics, signal plus interference to noise ratio, or channel quality indicator, and at least in part on the identities of the cells in which the radio link failures are detected.