168 Trees were an early consideration, especially tree growth. To model tree growth, the team has acquired tree data spanning many years, with details about seasonal changes that impact signal. “We don’t know individual tree types,” said Rebecca King, GIS lead at Vodafone. “It might be unrealistic to think we could capture whether each tree is an oak, hazelnut, or conifer across the whole country, but we would capture that if we could.” Vodafone’s 360-degree view of the network and signal strength is stored in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud; attributes are cataloged and visualized using ArcGIS Enterprise. The country-scale details about clutter include more than 40 million environmental features. Network features, such as towers and equipment, add another 500,000 records. Network performance data adds billions of rows of data to the database to depict signal strength across space and time. And keeping track of population volumes, such as how many people are on the road or travel through each train station, allows Vodafone to conduct capacity planning. Engineers Gain Awareness The digital twin has become instrumental to planning. With details about topography, cell towers, and the equipment on each tower, engineers can preplan for work on individual towers or whole sections of the network. They can look at how a new tower could fill a gap in coverage, or model how adding or removing a component might impact signal strength. The digital twin also enables engineers to measure infrastructure remotely, which saves time and money because they don’t need to go to the field every time to take a measurement. It can also be used to direct them to the cell For engineers, the digital twin enables signal propagation modeling to tune the signal to the neighborhood and user demand. Image courtesy of Vodafone.
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