Correlation-Based Cell Degradation Detection for Operational Fault Detection in Cellular Wireless Base-Stations

The management and troubleshooting of faults in mobile radio networks are challenging as the complexity of radio networks is increasing. A proactive approach to system failures is needed to reduce the number of outages and to reduce the duration of outages in the operational network in order to meet operator’s requirements on network availability, robustness, coverage, capacity and service quality. Automation is needed to protect the operational expenses of t he network. Through a good performance of the network element and a low failure probability the network can operate more efficiently reducing the necessity for equipment investments. We present a new method that utilizes the correlation between two cells as a means to detect degradations in cells. Reducing false alarms is also an important objective of fault management systems as false alarms result in distractions that eventually lead to additional cost. Our algorithm is on the one hand capable to identify degraded cells and on the other hand able to reduce the possibility of false alarms.