Artificial Intelligence-Powered Mobile Edge Computing-Based Anomaly Detection in Cellular Networks

Escalating cell outages and congestion—treated as anomalies—cost a substantial revenue loss to the cellular operators and severely affect subscriber quality of experience. State-of-the-art literature applies feed-forward deep neural network at core network (CN) for the detection of above problems in a single cell; however, the solution is impractical as it will overload the CN that monitors thousands of cells at a time. Inspired from mobile edge computing and breakthroughs of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision research, in this article we split the network into several 100-cell regions each monitored by an edge server; and propose a framework that preprocesses raw call detail records having user activities to create an image-like volume, fed to a CNN model. The framework outputs a multilabeled vector identifying anomalous cell(s). Our results suggest that our solution can detect anomalies with up to 96% accuracy, and is scalable and expandable for industrial Internet of Things environment.