  Coverage planning and optimization is one of the most crucial tasks for a
radio network operator. Efficient coverage optimization requires accurate
coverage estimation. This estimation relies on geo-located field measurements
which are gathered today during highly expensive drive tests (DT); and will be
reported in the near future by users' mobile devices thanks to the 3GPP
Minimizing Drive Tests (MDT) feature~\cite{3GPPproposal}. This feature consists
in an automatic reporting of the radio measurements associated with the
geographic location of the user's mobile device. Such a solution is still
costly in terms of battery consumption and signaling overhead. Therefore,
predicting the coverage on a location where no measurements are available
remains a key and challenging task. This paper describes a powerful tool that
gives an accurate coverage prediction on the whole area of interest: it builds
a coverage map by spatially interpolating geo-located measurements using the
Kriging technique. The paper focuses on the reduction of the computational
complexity of the Kriging algorithm by applying Fixed Rank Kriging (FRK). The
performance evaluation of the FRK algorithm both on simulated measurements and
real field measurements shows a good trade-off between prediction efficiency
and computational complexity. In order to go a step further towards the
operational application of the proposed algorithm, a multicellular use-case is
studied. Simulation results show a good performance in terms of coverage
prediction and detection of the best serving cell.
