A measurement study of short-time cell outages in mobile cellular networks

We study the Short-Time Cell Outages (STCO) phenomena affecting Base Stations (BSs) in a mobile cellular operator network. The STCO is defined as a short-time outage of all or some BS cells (sectors) that lasts up to 30?min in a day, thus still guaranteeing more than 98% of operation. It is type of outage which cannot be detected directly through an operator network monitoring system. Although a complete characterization of STCOs has never been reported in the literature, such events are affecting the cellular network of every mobile operator. In particular, a statistical analysis of STCOs based on BSs measurements of a complete operator mobile network is performed. Our results show that: (i) STCOs impact everyday life of an operator network, (ii) high load of cells corresponds to an increase in the number of STCOs and their duration, (iii) the impact of STCOs to single sectors and whole BSs is not negligible, (iv) most of STCOs are recorded in urban areas compared to rural ones, (v) the impact of STCOs on users is higher in rural areas compared to urban ones, and (vi) the STCOs are correlated with the transferred traffic rather than the outside air temperature.

[1]  Bhaskar Krishnamachari,et al.  Dynamic Base Station Switching-On/Off Strategies for Green Cellular Networks , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[2]  Leandros Tassiulas,et al.  Dynamic Resource Provisioning for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Access Networks: A Survey and an Outlook , 2014, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[3]  Bjarne E. Helvik,et al.  Failures and changes in cellular access networks; A study of field data , 2011, 2011 8th International Workshop on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN).

[4]  Zhisheng Niu,et al.  Toward dynamic energy-efficient operation of cellular network infrastructure , 2011, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[5]  Lawrence G. Votta,et al.  Analysis of failure and recovery rates in a wireless telecommunications system , 2002, Proceedings International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks.

[6]  Marco Ajmone Marsan,et al.  On the effectiveness of single and multiple base station sleep modes in cellular networks , 2013, Comput. Networks.

[7]  Josip Lorincz,et al.  Is green networking beneficial in terms of device lifetime? , 2015, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[8]  Josip Lorincz,et al.  Increasing device lifetime in backbone networks with sleep modes , 2013, 2013 21st International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks - (SoftCOM 2013).

[9]  K. Pearson VII. Note on regression and inheritance in the case of two parents , 1895, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

[10]  Mehdi Amirijoo,et al.  Cell Outage Compensation in LTE Networks: Algorithms and Performance Assessment , 2011, 2011 IEEE 73rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring).

[11]  Zhisheng Niu,et al.  TANGO: traffic-aware network planning and green operation , 2011, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[12]  A. Lozano,et al.  What Will 5 G Be ? , 2014 .

[13]  Jeffrey G. Andrews,et al.  Heterogeneous cellular networks: From theory to practice , 2012, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[14]  Josip Lorincz,et al.  Heuristic Algorithms for Optimization of Energy Consumption in Wireless Access Networks , 2011, KSII Trans. Internet Inf. Syst..

[15]  Heng Zhang,et al.  Achieving cell outage compensation in radio access network with automatic network management , 2011, 2011 IEEE GLOBECOM Workshops (GC Wkshps).

[16]  Chen-Nee Chuah,et al.  Characterization of Failures in an Operational IP Backbone Network , 2008, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[17]  Qing Liao,et al.  COD: A Cooperative Cell Outage Detection Architecture for Self-Organizing Femtocell Networks , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[18]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  Towards a comparative science of cities: using mobile traffic records in New York, London and Hong Kong , 2014, ArXiv.

[19]  Jeffrey G. Andrews,et al.  What Will 5G Be? , 2014, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[20]  Holger Claussen,et al.  On femto deployment architectures and macrocell offloading benefits in joint macro-femto deployments , 2010, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[21]  Josip Lorincz,et al.  Heuristic approach for optimized energy savings in wireless access networks , 2010, SoftCOM 2010, 18th International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks.

[22]  Sudarshan Rao Operational Fault Detection in cellular wireless base-stations , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management.