Applying Social Event Data for the Management of Cellular Networks

The Internet provides a growing variety of social data sources: calendars, event aggregators, social networks, browsers, and so on. Also, the mechanisms to gather information from these sources, such as web services, semantic web, and big data techniques, have become more accessible and efficient. This allows detailed prediction of major expected events and their associated crowds. Due to the increasing requirements for service provision, particularly in urban areas, having information on those events would be extremely useful for operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM) tasks, since the social events largely affect the cellular network performance. Therefore, this article presents a framework for the automatic acquisition and processing of social data, as well as their association with network elements (NEs) and their performance. The main functionalities of this system, which have been devised to directly work in real networks, are defined and developed. Different OAM applications of the proposed approach are analyzed, and the system is evaluated in a real deployment.