STAD: Spatio-Temporal Anomaly Detection Mechanism for Mobile Network Management

Abstract

Unusual Spatio-Temporal fluctuations in cellular network traffic may lead to drastic network management misbehaviors and at least abnormal drops in quality of experience. It is also expected that the management of future cellular networks will mostly rely on machine learning and automation. In this article, we present a dynamic on-line data mining technique to detect these network anomalies allowing, network operators to pro-actively monitor and control a variety of real-world phenomena with less damage to the overall experience. To overcome the network performance degradation that can occur in real time, the network manager must imperatively and instantly identify abnormalities and hence provide a better continuous quality of service for the subscribers. Based on real cellular communication traces, we propose an automated framework, called STAD, ensuring spatio-temporal detection outliers using a combination of machine learning techniques including One-class SVM (OCSVM), Support Vector Regression (SVR) and recurrent neural networks, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). STAD is double checked with two real datasets of CDRs where results show high accuracy compared to the Isolation Forest and Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models.