Patent ID: 8195171

Claim:
A method for estimating coverage of a selected geographic area by a cellular radio mobile communications network comprising a plurality of radio base stations, comprising: dividing the selected area into a plurality of area elements; determining expected serving radio base stations in said plurality of radio base stations expected to serve the area elements, based on an estimation of the strength of the radio electromagnetic field of the radio base stations in the area elements, said determining expected serving base radio stations comprising: estimating for each radio base station of said plurality of radio base stations, a respective probabilistic distribution of the strength of the radio electromagnetic fields irradiated b the radio base station and perceived in each area element of said plurality of area elements; and calculating for each radio base station of said plurality of radio base stations and for each area element of said plurality of area elements, respective probabilities that the radio base station serves said plurality of area elements, based on said estimated probabilistic distributions, wherein: estimation of the strength of the radio electromagnetic field is determined by simulating a radio electromagnetic wave propagation from the radio base stations in said geographic area and calculating an average electromagnetic field strength in each area element; said estimating the probabilistic distributions comprises: associating with the electromagnetic field strength a probabilistic distribution with average value and variance depending on said average electromagnetic field strength and at least one effect selected from the group of: an intrinsic wave propagation simulation error, a field fading error, an indoor field attenuation, and a body loss attenuation; and determining respective probability density functions; and said calculating the probabilities comprises: determining exhaustive sets of events for which the radio base stations act as serving stations for the considered area element, based on a predetermined network access criterion implemented by the network for assigning a serving cell to a mobile terminal; deriving from said sets of events respective integration domains for integrating the probability density functions; and integrating the probability density functions over said integration domains.