Anomaly detection for fault detection in wireless community networks using machine learning

Machine learning has received increasing attention in computer science in recent years and many types of methods have been proposed. In computer networks, little attention has been paid to the use of ML for fault detection, the main reason being the lack of datasets. This is motivated by the reluctance of network operators to share data about their infrastructure and network failures. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap using anomaly detection techniques to discern hardware failure events in wireless community networks. For this purpose we use 4 unsupervised machine learning, ML, approaches based on different principles. We have built a dataset from a production wireless community network, gathering traffic and non-traffic features, e.g. CPU and memory. For the numerical analysis we investigated the ability of the different ML approaches to detect an unprovoked gateway failure that occurred during data collection. Our numerical results show that all the tested approaches improve to detect the gateway failure when non-traffic features are also considered. We see that, when properly tuned, all ML methods are effective to detect the failure. Nonetheless, using decision boundaries and other analysis techniques we observe significant different behavior among the ML methods.