A system and method that provides radio field strength modeling useful for
determining cellular telephone site coverage. The system and method
automate sampling procedures, collecting data at various monitoring points
within a radio propagation coverage area. The collected data is then
interpolated and spurious samples are eliminated. The resultant radio
field strength data and respective location data is then analyzed using
either a modified Newton second order gradient or a pseudo-exhaustive
search method to modeling the field strength for convex and non-convex
models, respectively. An iterative approach is used to facilitate the use
of model constraints and to mitigate calibration errors attributable to
highly correlated variables. For pseudo-exhaustive searches, noise is
introduced into the data analysis routines to avoid convergence on local
minimum which would otherwise inhibit convergence towards global
solutions.
