Ensemble Learning Based Sleeping Cell Detection in Cloud Radio Access Networks

Sleeping cell problem refers to the degradation or unavailability of network services without triggered alarm, which is one of the most critical issues in current mobile networks. This problem is generally not detectable by the operators but only revealed after users’ complaints occur. Therefore, it leads to the degradations of network performance in the service provision in the long run. To address this problem, we introduce a cloud-based sleeping cell detection platform into radio access networks (RANs) to detect the sleeping cells and deal with them automatically. In the cloud RANs (C-RANs), we combine and improve different methods employed in the pioneering studies in this field, and creatively use labeled training data and ensemble learning method for improving the accuracy. Particularly, we utilize expert optimization experience for further improving the detection framework. To evaluate the proposed ensemble learning based sleeping cell detection framework, we use a time-series dataset of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in a real-world network. Trace-driven evaluation results show that the proposed framework can achieve up to 14.38% and 20.50% improvements compared with two existing schemes, respectively.