Analysis of mobile radio access network using the self-organizing map

Mobile networks produce a huge amount of spatio-temporal data. The data consists of parameters of base stations and quality information of calls. The self-organizing map (SOM) is an efficient tool for visualization and clustering of multidimensional data. It transforms the input vectors on a two-dimensional grid of prototype vectors and orders them. The ordered prototype vectors are easier to visualize and explore than the original data. There are two possible ways to start the analysis. We can build either a model of the network using state vectors with parameters from all mobile cells or a general one cell model trained using one cell state vector from all cells. In both methods, further analysis is needed. In the first method the distributions of parameters of one cell can be compared with the others and in the second it can be compared how well the general model represents each cell.