ANTENNA LOCATIONS,
ORIENTATIONS AND HEIGHT
End-to-end simulations start at the locations of 5G base stations. The coordinates in 3D space should ideally be accurate up to centimeters. Both the azimuthal and elevation orientation is important, as well as their positioning on the building or tower.
Plan A
From mobile network operators
Ideally, we receive the full location in 3D space of base stations, with their exact orientation from the entire networks of multiple mobile service operators. Even receiving a subset of this data would be invaluable.
Plan B
From governmental agencies
Governments, particularly in Europe, often keep a record of all base station locations in their cadastral maps in their territory, typically with less details on the site. For example, the FCC's ASR dataset is sometimes incomplete, but a good starting point. These datasets usually do not have a public API. To conduct our analysis across countries, we can discuss if an API can be made available.
Plan C
From crowd-sourced open datasets
Current solution
A number of services use crowd-sourced data to reverse-engineer the location of antennas using the triangulation of GPS signals. While the datasets are vast, the accuracy is too low for our pruposes, in particular when the crowd-sourced data is sparse. Cooperation is nonetheless possible.