A Cell Outage Management Framework for Dense Heterogeneous Networks

In this paper, we present a novel Cell Outage Management (COM) framework for Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) with split control and data planes -a candidate architecture for meeting future capacity, quality of service and energy efficiency demands. In such architecture, the control and data functionalities are not necessarily handled by the same node. The control base stations (BSs) manage the transmission of control information and user equipment (UE) mobility, while the data BSs handle UE data. An implication of this split architecture is that, an outage to a BS in one plane has to be compensated by other BSs in the same plane. Our COM framework addresses this challenge by incorporating two distinct Cell Outage Detection (COD) algorithms to cope with the idiosyncrasies of both the data and control planes. The COD algorithm for control cells leverages the relatively larger number of UEs in the control cell to gather large scale Minimize Drive Testing (MDT) reports data, and detects outage by applying machine learning and anomaly detection techniques. To improve outage detection accuracy, we also investigate and compare the performance of two anomaly detecting algorithms, i.e. k− nearest neighbor and local outlier factor based anomaly detector, within the control COD. On the other hand, for data cells COD, we propose a heuristic Grey-Prediction based approach, which can work with the small number of UEs in the data cell, by exploiting the fact that the control BS manages UE-data BS connectivity, by receiving a periodic update of the Received Signal Reference Power (RSRP) statistic between the UEs and data BSs in its coverage. The detection accuracy of the heuristic data COD algorithm is further improved by exploiting the fourier series of residual error that is inherent to grey prediction model. Our COM framework integrates these two COD algorithms with a Cell Outage Compensation (COC) algorithm which can be applied to both planes. Our COC solution utilizes an Actor Critic (AC) based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm, which optimizes the capacity and coverage of the identified outage zone in a plane, by adjusting the antenna gain and transmission power of the surrounding BSs in that plane. The simulation results show that the proposed framework can detect both data and control cell outage, and also compensate for the detected outage in a reliable manner