A Cell Outage Detection Algorithm Using Neighbor Cell List Reports

Base stations experiencing hardware or software failures have negative impact on network performance and customer satisfaction. The timely detection of such so-called outage or sleeping cells can be a difficult and costly task, depending on the type of the error. As a first step towards self-healing capabilities of mobile communication networks, operators have formulated a need for an automated cell outage detection. This paper presents and evaluates a novel cell outage detection algorithm, which is based on the neighbor cell list reporting of mobile terminals. Using statistical classification techniques as well as a manually designed heuristic, the algorithm is able to detect most of the outage situations in our simulations.