Anne-Marie Bosneag

Real-world experiences with CQI-based analyses for dense LTE networks

Much work has been done in the area of telecommunications transmission parameters and, in particular, Channel Quality Indicators, to analyse the best ways to improve the performance and quality of communications. However, there is a gap in published papers when it comes to real-world experiences with CQI reports and network-side analysis of transmission parameters that can provide information about user equipment and network elements behaviour. In this paper, we present our experiences with a real-world analysis of dense LTE networks, focusing on two main aspects - what information can CQI reports give us about the behaviour of user equipment in the network, and what information do they provide in relation to the individual network elements. We show what insights can be derived from a network wide statistical analysis of CQI reports and how these insights can be further used by operators to understand potential problems in their network.

Automatic discovery of sub-optimal radio performance in LTE RAN networks

As telecommunication networks have become large complex systems, it is recognized today that there is an urgent need for providing comprehensive views about how the network operates, instead of fragmented reports about the different elements in the network. We propose a system that holistically analyzes the network along carefully balanced dimensions, both by using historic data and by using data across multiple LTE RAN networks. Our system learns baseline behaviours and provides insights to the operators alerting them about deviations from this learnt behaviour. The system can also help operators by discovering network configurations that lead to good radio performance, which can be used to bootstrap the network configuration process. All the learnt behaviour is made available globally through a global sharing service. We validated our approach using real 4G RAN network data, and show that we discover behaviours in the network which would not be obvious to the operator otherwise.

A Distributed Mechanism for Detecting Cell Data Inconsistencies in LTE Radio Access Networks

The evolution for the third generation (3G) wide area mobile networks (long term evolution LTE) is currently nearing completion in the third generation partnership program (3GPP). Fundamental changes to classical public mobile systems have been proposed. These architectural changes specify that the network architecture for the LTE radio access networks changes from the 3G hierarchical design towards a flat design. The new model greatly improves latency for data traffic setup, but also introduces challenges to the traditional telecom network management architecture that relies on a centralised model. Issues related to scalability and availability become critical, especially for management tasks that involve checks of properties over an entire (sub)network. This paper proposes a layered peer-to-peer architecture for the network management system of LTE radio access networks, and shows how the problem of checking the consistency of neighbouring cell relations for handover may be solved in a distributed manner. The algorithm was tested both on Ericssons Mobile Switching Platform to demonstrate technical feasibility, and on a larger scale, on top of the Bamboo simulator, using real cell information provided by 3G operators that implemented the Ericsson solution. The experiments show that the distributed algorithm correctly checks the consistency of neighbouring cell relations with very high percentages of detecting inconsistencies in both static and dynamic networks of increasingly larger size.

Multi-service Networks: A New Approach to End-to-End Topology Management

The ability to couple enterprise-wide views of your services, resources, and networks is a cornerstone of multi-service networks. The information repository needed to achieve this task is an important building block in creating a correct view of the capabilities of the network and is therefore crucial for service deployment, activation and management. At the same time, creating and updating the information repository is a very challenging task. Traditional inventory solutions are static in nature and reflect homogenous network architectures, leading to problems of data consistency between the managed domain and the view at the management node. Moreover, today there is no common data model in use, while tabulation of inventory information between different domains is very hard, if not impossible, to obtain using the current solutions, which makes an end-to-end view of the network very hard to achieve.