Contextualized indicators for online failure diagnosis in cellular networks

This paper presents a novel approach for self-healing in cellular networks based on the application of mobile terminals context information: time, service, activity, identity and, especially, location. Context information is therefore used to support root cause analysis, providing improved network fault diagnosis compared to classical non-context-aware approaches. The integration of context information is implemented by means of the newly defined contextualized indicators. These are used in order to integrate user equipment context information in pre-existent failure management schemes. The presented techniques are especially suitable for indoor small cell scenarios, whose particular conditions of dynamic user distribution, overlapping coverage, dynamic radio and service provisioning environment, etc., make previous diagnosis schemes especially unreliable. The algorithms and methodology for the proposed context-aware system are defined and its performance is assessed by means of an LTE system-level simulator. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.