MOBILE NETWORK PLANNING IN THE HOST CITY OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS AS UNCONVENTIONAL LECTURE UNIT

International students stay only for a limited time in the region around the university location. Adjacent to their regular study they also learn the cultural features. This includes curious words and phrases, festivals but also famous monuments and buildings of the region or the next city center. To give students a better overview of their host city and improve their knowledge of topography and orientation a sort of games are available like quizzes or paper chases. Another motivation to explore the urban area is to organize some selected lecture units in rooms of famous buildings like boardrooms, steeples, theatres, museums or at outside park areas.

In this work another approach will be presented. Students of the master study program Communication Engineering have to design the 3D-topology map of the city center of the university’s town. This map will then be used as building layer in a software tool to make coverage simulations of mobile networks. The aim of this project oriented lecture is to design a complete mobile phone network similar like a network operator and to consider the city layout with street canyons, public squares, tall towers and vegetation areas. These tasks are integrated in the master course lecture Mobile Network Planning.

A group of students have to analyze about one square kilometer inside the city. They work with online and printed maps, photo cameras, note books and pencils. They have to study the building geometry of each house especially the height, the wall material like wood, bricks or concrete. The students also have to analyze the people density of the urban areas. Typical questions during the working tasks are: where office buildings and shopping malls are and how many people move, work or live there. To get more detailed data the students can ask the municipal authorities for official maps.

After the viewing and screening task the students enter their sketches as collection of polygon lines into a geographical information system. Online commercial and free map resources are used as reference. This polygons form the building layer of a special network simulation tool. Together with the building information but also the analyzed or assumed distribution of the spatial people density a complete city model is now available and can be provided for a detailed network coverage simulation with radio field strength and user capacity calculations.

Besides that, the output of such a project can be used for general teaching purposes for other students who are interested in mobile network planning with real data. But the main focus is to give the international students another view of their host city and get them actively involved with the urban infrastructure.