MOBILE

Over the past 10 years, the mobile communication market has increased enormously. New networks are going to be planned and established. The planning of a network service requires among others a digital elevation model (DEM) and a digital land-use map ('clutter data') to be available world-wide.

However, accurate and updated spatial data is often not available. The main objective of the MOBILE project was the development of methods that can be applied world-wide in order to supply spatial data for mobile network planning.

This included:

• the generation of an accurate land use classification using optical satellite data,
• the generation of a digital surface model using spaceborne InSAR techniques,
• the quality assessment of the generated input data with respect to the planning tools.

The mobile network planning software showed that signal predic-tions have a high correspondence to the measured signal strength using these data sets. As a result of this project, the network service provider Swisscom settled for this methodology to produce a new DEM and clutter data set for Switzerland.