Multi-dimensional Impact Detection and Diagnosis in Cellular Networks

Abstract

Performance impacts are commonly observed in cellular networks and are induced by several factors, such as software upgrade and configuration changes. The variability in traffic patterns across different granularities can lead to impact cancellation or dilution. As a result, performance impacts are hard to capture if not aggregated over problematic features. Analyzing performance impact across all possible feature combinations is too expensive. On the other hand, the set of features that causes issues is unpredictable due to the highly dynamic and heterogeneous cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that dynamically explores those network feature combinations that are likely to have problems by using a summary structure Sketch. We further design a neural network based algorithm to localize root cause. We achieve high scalability in neural network by leveraging the Lattice and Sketch structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our impact detection and diagnosis through extensive evaluation using data collected from a major tier-1 cellular carrier in US and synthetic traces.