Community Cellular Networks Coverage Visualizer

TL;DR

This work tackles the limited visibility into Community Cellular Networks (CCNs) by introducing the Privacy-Preserving Community Cellular Networks Coverage Visualizer, a dashboard that combines geospatial heatmaps and time-series analytics to assess site performance. The approach uses a two-server architecture (frontend and backend) to precompute and aggregate data, enabling scalable, privacy-protecting visualization of latency, upload, and download metrics across CCN sites. Key contributions include a UI/UX design that supports multi-site exploration, robust data preprocessing and aggregation onto the backend, and an integrated map-plus-chart interface suitable for volunteers, researchers, and engineers. Although the current implementation relies on simulated data, the framework is designed for crown-sourcing and future real data integration to aid site placement, outage detection, and network reliability assessment in rural and underserved areas.

Abstract

The community cellular networks volunteers and researchers currently rarely have an access to information about the networks for each site. This makes it difficult for them to evaluate network performance, identify outrages and downtimes, or even to show the current site locations. In this paper, we propose the Community Cellular Networks Coverage Visualizer, a performance dashboard to help reduce the workload of technicians and gain trust from illustrating the reliability of the networks. The map displays the overall and in-depth performance for each current and future CCNs sites with privacy-focused implementation, while the multi-series line chart emphasizes on providing the capability of network overtime. Not only it will help users identify locations that have stronger and reliable signals nearby, but our applicaiton will also be an essential tool for volunteers and engineers to determine the optimal locations to install a new site and quickly identify possible network failures.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: NYC Mesh map overview
• Figure 2: Our map overview
• Figure 3: Site selection from NYC Mesh
• Figure 4: Flent's graphing implementation
• Figure 5: A loading sign while the data is being loaded on our summary multi-series line chart.