On non-parametric models for detecting outages in the mobile network

Abstract

The wireless/cellular communications network is composed of a complex set of interconnected computation units that form the mobile core network. The mobile core network is engineered to be fault tolerant and redundant; small errors that manifest themselves in the network are usually resolved automatically. However, some errors remain latent, and if discovered early enough can provide warnings to the network operator about a pending service outage. For mobile network operators, it is of high interest to detect these minor anomalies near real-time. In this work we use performance data from a 4G-LTE network carrier to train two parameter-free models. A first model relies on isolation forests, and the second is histogram based. The trained models represent the data characteristics for normal periods; new data is matched against the trained models to classify the new time period as being normal or abnormal. We show that the proposed methods can gauge the mobile network state with more subtlety than standard success/failure thresholds used in real-world networks today.