Project Description for Cellular Operator

Introduction

Cellular networks provide us with much-needed connectivity. The cellular network market landscape in any region is generally very competitive. Cellular operators want to earn new customers and retain them with great services at low service charges. These companies survey major and minor areas of a region before setting up their towers. This survey helps them analyze which sites are best for maximum coverage.

The scenario and the problems discussed in this chapter also relate to site analysis for signal coverage and improving coverage.

Statement

Assume you are a developer on AT&T’s engineering team. You have received survey reports detailing the signal strengths in different buildings and open areas. You have to analyze the data to identify low and high coverage points to assess the viability of operating in that place. Additionally, you have to program a vintage system to power up with minimum computation time.

Features

We need to introduce the following features to implement the functionalities discussed above:

• Feature #1: Determine the furthest location in a rectangular grid beyond which a handset will receive the optimum signal to work.

• Feature #2: Determine the largest area in a rectangular grid in which signal coverage is minimum.

• Feature #3: Optimally power up a vintage system using dial turns.

• Feature #4: Query the peak number of users from a rectangular subset of the actual grid served by the operator.

• Feature #5: Given the locations of base stations in a rectangular grid, determine the densest deployment region.

• Feature #6: Find the maximum number of users connected to a base station in every k ms sliding window.

• Feature #7: Determine the maximum contiguous area in a rectangular grid with satisfactory coverage.

• Feature #8: Deploy k signal repeaters to get the maximum continuous stretch of stores with acceptable signal strength, in an aisle of a mall.

Understanding these feature requests and designing their solutions will help us implement the requested functionality into AT&T’s system.

In the next few lessons, we’ll discuss these features’ recommended implementations. The solutions to these basic problems are also applicable to other common coding interview questions.