Detecting anomalies in cellular networks using an ensemble method

The Self-Organizing Networks (SON) concept includes the functional area known as self-healing, which aims to automate the detection and diagnosis of, and recovery from, network degradations and outages. This paper focuses on the problem of cell anomaly detection, addressing partial and complete degradations in cell-service performance, and it proposes an adaptive ensemble method framework for modeling cell behavior. The framework uses Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine cell-performance status and is able to cope with legitimate system changes (i.e., concept drift). The results, generated using real cellular network data, suggest that the proposed ensemble method automatically and significantly improves the detection quality over univariate and multivariate methods, while using intrinsic system knowledge to enhance performance.