2017 International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation

Adaptive Root Cause Analysis

for Self-Healing in 5G Networks

Harrison Mfula Jukka K. Nurminen

Nokia Networks Department of Computer Science
Karaportti, Espoo, Finland Aalto University, Espoo, Finland
Email: harrison.mfula@nokia.com Email: jukka.k.nurminen@aalto.fi

Abstract—Root cause analysis (RCA) is a common and re- continues to attract a lot of criticism especially in discussions
curring task performed by operators of cellular networks. It debating the challenges and opportunities of its possible ap-
is done mainly to keep customers satisfied with the quality of plication in emerging technologies such as LTE-A and 5G.
offered services and to maximize return on investment (ROI)
by minimizing and where possible eliminating the root causes Many operators and domain experts agree that the current
of faults in cellular networks. Currently, the actual detection fault detection and diagnosis procedure shown on Fig. 1 is too
and diagnosis of faults or potential faults is still a manual and slow and no longer viable technically and financially due to the
slow process often carried out by network experts who manually
analyze and correlate various pieces of network data such as,
ever growing size and complexity of modern cellular networks.
alarms, call traces, configuration management (CM) and key As a result, some industry and academic studies aimed at
performance indicator (KPI) data in order to come up with the addressing these challenges have been conducted [8] [9]. The
most probable root cause of a given network fault. In this paper, most prominent among these studies is [10] which resulted in
we propose an automated fault detection and diagnosis solution the standardization of self-healing (SH) by 3GPP since release
called adaptive root cause analysis (ARCA). The solution uses 10 [11]. Self-healing aims at automating network fault trou-
measurements and other network data together with Bayesian bleshooting and recovery. The standard provides the business
network theory to perform automated evidence based RCA. cases and theoretical guidelines of self-healing while leaving
Compared to the current common practice, our solution is faster the implementation details open to vendor preferences. In [2]
due to automation of the entire RCA process. The solution is
also cheaper because it needs fewer or no personnel in order
to operate and it improves efficiency through domain knowledge
reuse during adaptive learning. As it uses a probabilistic Bayesian
classifier, it can work with incomplete data and it can handle large
datasets with complex probability combinations. Experimental
results from stratified synthesized data affirmatively validate the
feasibility of using such a solution as a key part of self-healing
(SH) especially in emerging self-organizing network (SON) based
solutions in LTE Advanced (LTE-A) and 5G.
Keywords: Root cause analysis, self-healing, LTE-A, 5G

I. I NTRODUCTION
The lack of automation, rising costs and complexity of
fixing faults especially those that are related to emerging
cellular network technologies such as LTE-A and 5G were
the main motivational factors of this research.
Root cause analysis (RCA) is a common task performed
by operators for detecting and diagnosing the root causes of
faults or problems in cellular networks. In spite of the various Fig. 1: Manual Root Cause Analysis
improvements in the operations support systems (OSS) over
the years, RCA remains an ad-hoc, manual and slow task
which is heavily dependent on the scarce knowledge of a for example, the authors developed an automatic detection
few domain experts who actually perform fault detection and and diagnosis framework for mobile communication systems
diagnosis in a way similar to what is shown on Fig. 1. It is also while in a related study, the authors in [4] implemented an
strange to note that even though RCA is such a common and RCA solution based on self-organizing map (SOM). Despite
recurring task among network operators, there is a shortage of all these efforts, studies on this topic are still scarce and
sample datasets of faulty cases and accompanying RCA results fragmented. This fragmentation prompted authors of [1] to
available currently to the radio network research community. focus on unifying available information and key concepts
Furthermore, despite being the most widely adopted practice which they presented in the form of a common framework
in current networks, manual fault detection and diagnosis for self-healing.

978-1-5386-3250-5/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE 136

DOI 10.1109/HPCS.2017.31
 While previous studies have made several contributions
to self-healing, our work contributes field experience and
practical domain knowledge to both the industry and research
community on this emerging topic through the introduction of:
I. A fault detection algorithm which uses a Chi-squared
test to detect significant cell performance deviation
from expected profile values.
II. An automated fault root cause diagnosis algorithm
based on Bayesian network theory.
III. A ranking algorithm based on Pareto principle used
to prioritize the diagnosed faults in order to maximize
return on investment with respect to business policies
and severity.
an automated troubleshooting solution that can cope
with huge and ever growing data amounts as expected
in LTE-A and 5G cellular networks.
III. A DAPTIVE ROOT C AUSE A NALYSIS (ARCA)
In this section, we introduce ARCA, our proposed solution
for automating root cause analysis of cellular network faults
based on continuous adaptive learning.
Like a human expert, the developed solution uses continu-
ous adaptive learning for smart decision making. Details about
the key components of the solution are presented in the next
subsection.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II
summarizes some relevant inference methods investigated.
Section III describes the proposed automated root cause anal-
ysis solution. Evaluation of the proposed solution is done in
Section IV. Section V summarizes relevant literature. Finally,
Section VI concludes the paper and gives some details about
future plans.
II. OVERVIEW OF P OPULAR I NFERENCE M ETHODS
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), fuzzy set theory (FST),
rule based systems (RBS) and Bayesian networks (BNs) are
among the most important and popular methods used by
experts to map observations to most probable root causes in
various disciplines.
Other than our own comparative summary of characteristics
relevant to this research which are presented in the next
subsection, detailed descriptions of these methods is outside
the scope of this paper.
A. Chi-squared test based fault detection
Time-dependent statistical profiles are used to capture and
present expected values and distribution of monitored cell
KPIs such as Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) while
taking into account their temporal variations. Often profile
information is captured from expert knowledge or learned from
statistical network measurements. In this research, we created
three profiles which are commonly used in cellular networks:
• Urban weekday
• Urban weekend
• Rural
Further, we used the sliding window concept to capture the
temporal aspect of processing measurements in defined inter-
vals. The actual fault detection is done using a Chi-squared
test (χ2 ).

A. Comparative summary of popular inference methods

TABLE I: Comparison of Popular Inference Methods

Parameter ANN FST RBS BN
Uncertainty type Fuzzy, probability Fuzzy Rule Probability
Uncertainty Weight vector Membership Rule Probability
representation Fig. 2: χ2 - based Profile Deviation Detection
Explanation Hard Hard Depends Easy
Relation explanation Hard Easy Depends Easy
Training Huge Huge n/a Small We use a Chi-squared test as a statistical test for determining
whether the deviations found, if any, between the observed
and the expected KPI values captured in the profiles are
B. Selected inference method significantly different. Formally, it is written as:
Based on Table I analysis, BN was seen as the most suitable n
inference method because:
X (Oi − Ei )2
χ2 = (1)
i=1
Ei
I. In cellular networks, relationships among different
probable causes of faults is uncertain and thus, they where O represents the observed value and E the expected
can be expressed in terms of probability. value. The degrees of freedom (d.f) is calculated as:
II. Training data related to faults is scarce and often
incomplete, BNs provide a good fit in this context
as well because they need less training data. v =n−k (2)
III. BNs have a proven reputation of coping well within
applications that deal with a lot data in various where v, n and k represent the d.f, number of possible nominal
industries [3] [6]. Likewise, their selection as a key categories a KPI can take and number of restrictions respec-
part of our diagnosis solution was aimed at building tively.

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 TABLE II: Example Chi-squared Statistic Calculation Using the naive independence assumption between every pair
of features, the joint probability based on (4) can be calculated
Day Observed (O) Expected (E) O-E (O − E)2
(O−E)2 as:
E
Monday 30 25 5 25 1.000 n
Y
Tuesday 14 25 11 121 4.840 P (h|D) = P (D|hi )P (hi ) (5)
Wednesday 34 30 4 16 0.533 i=1
Thursday 45 40 5 25 0.625
Friday 57 60 3 9 3.333 From the classification perspective, this means that we need
Total 180 180 34 45 10.331 solve:
n
Y
hM AP = argmaxh∈H P (hi ) P (D|hi ) (6)
Table II shows an example of how to calculate and use a i=1
χ2 statistic. For this example, we assume a significance level
of α = 0.05 and use a weekday profile which results in 5 In practice, solving (6) involves multiplying many conditional
possible categories and 1 restriction, therefore, d.f is calculated probabilities which are usually small values, therefore, we
as 5 − 1 = 4. From the Chi-square table, we read the critical switch to logarithm notation to avoid floating point underflow
value (c.v) of 9.488. Since our test statistic from Table II errors:
(χ2 = 10.331) is greater than the c.v (9.488), we conclude n
X
that the cell performance has deviated significantly from what hM AP = argmaxh∈H [ logP (hi ) + logP (D|hi ) ] (7)
is typically expected, therefore, we include this cell to the i=1
list of cells to be diagnosed. The actual diagnosis is done as
described in the next subsection. where logP (D|hi ) is interpreted as the weight that indicates
how good an indicator D is for hi . In the same way, logP (hi )
B. Naive Bayes classifier (NBC) based diagnosis is a weight that indicates the prior relative frequency of hi .
Together they represent the evidence used by our diagnosis
NBC is a probabilistic classifier which is based on Bayes’ algorithm. They are calculated using Bayesian estimation.
theorem with a strong (naive) assumption of independence
among predictors. As a probabilistic model, it is suitable In order to avoid bias and probability estimates which equal
for handling missing or uncertain data and inputs of high to zero during the calculation of likelihood, we use the m −
dimensions such as cellular network features. Bayes’ theorem estimate of probability which is written as:
describes the probability of an event based on conditions and nc + mp
symptoms that might be related to the event. For example, let P (D|h) = (8)
us assume that RSRP KPI directly influences the coverage of n+m
a cell in an LTE cellular network. Then using Bayes’ theorem, where n is the total number of instances of a given class in
a cell’s RSRP KPI value can be used to more accurately training dataset, nc is the number of instances of that given
assess the probability of an eventual cell coverage problem by class that have a given value. m is a constant called the
exploiting the mathematical probability dependence between equivalent sample size. It can be interpreted as augmenting
the cause and the symptom recorded in the service area. the n actual observations by an additional m virtual samples
Formally, Bayes’ theorem is formulated mathematically as: distributed according to p. In our KPI observation case, m may
P (D|h)P (h) have a value such as L, H or −− which represents low, high,
P (h|D) = (3) missing or negligible KPI value respectively, therefore, our m
P (D)
= 3. Finally, p is our prior estimate of the probability we wish
where P (h|D) is called the posterior probability. It represents to determine. In the absence of other prior information, it is
the probability of h given that D has been observed. P (D|h) commonly assumed to be uniform. Thus, in our case it can be
is called the likelihood. It represents the probability of D given assumed to be 1/3.
that h has been observed. P (h) represents the prior probability.
P (D) represents the probability of observing D. (7) forms the mathematical basis of the NBC based im-
plementation of the diagnosis component used by ARCA. The
From the diagnosis perspective, (3) is used as the basis for high level architecture and control flow of the entire solution
calculating the maximum a posteriori (MAP) among alternative is shown on Fig. 3.
hypotheses, for example, given H = {h1 , h2 ...hn } hypotheses
representing root causes, we need to compute the probability
of each hypothesis and then select the hypothesis with the C. Pareto analysis based fault fixing impact ranking
highest probability as the root cause. In other words: Pareto analysis is a statistical technique used in strategic
P (D|h1 )P (h1 ) P (D|h2 )P (h2 ) decision making processes. It is loosely based on the idea that
P (h1 |D) = P (D) , P (h2 |D) = P (D)
by doing 20% of the most important work, you can generate
P (D|hn )P (hn )
..., P (hn |D) = P (D)
80% of the benefit of doing the entire job [13].
In our solution, we use the Pareto Analyzer component
Since P (D) is the same in all calculations, we can ignore
shown on Fig. 3 to intelligently maximize return on investment
it and then simplify the calculation of the MAP hypothesis
by creating a list of top n faults which when fixed, will bring
using the following ratio:
the most value to the network operators and subscribers while
P (hi |D) ∝ P (D|hi )P (hi ) (4) taking into account business policies and severity.

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 TABLE III: Simulation Network Setup
Parameter Assumption
System frequency 2000 MHz
System bandwidth 10 MHz
Physical resource blocks (PRBs) 50
Thermal noise per PRB -121.4 dBm
Frequency reuse factor 1
Total active user equipment (UE) 500
Number of eNodeBs 28
Cells Monitored : 84 Diagnosed : 21
Cell layout Hexagonal grid with wrap-around
Inter-site distance 0.5Km
Path loss model L = 128.1 + 37.6 log10 ( R ),
R is user distance from BS,in Km
Shadowing STD 8 dB
Shadowing decorrelation 0.5 (sites), 1 (sectors)
Shadowing decorr. distance 50 m
Maximum eNodeB TX power 46dBm
Fig. 3: Adaptive Root Cause Analysis Architecture
UE velocity 10 km/h
Channel model Typical Urban (TU)
UE height hU E 1.5 m
D. SON function (SF) based corrective action eNB antenna height heN B 18.5 m (mean), 16 m (min.), 20 m (max.),
Packet scheduler(s) Resource-fair
After ranking of all diagnosed faults, relevant SFs are Traffic type Full-buffer
triggered in order to perform corrective actions as shown on UE TX power Minimum: -30dBm, Maximum: 23dBm
Fig. 3. From the operator’s point of view, a SF is a specialized Antenna gain after cable loss 15 dBi
tool that can be used for automatic configuration, optimization, UE Antenna gain 0 dBi
diagnosis and healing of cellular networks. White noise power density -174 dBm/Hz
Noise figures eNodeB : 5dB, UE : 9dB
The proposed solution is designed to work in both open
and closed loop mode.
The following KPIs were used in the simulations:
E. Measurement based corrective action evaluation
Using the Evaluator shown on Fig. 3, the impact of • RSRP: Reference Signal Received Power. Measured in
every corrective action is assessed using all applicable KPIs dBm, this is a standard KPI that depicts the strength
collected after every fault corrective action. In other words, of the pilot signals received in the downlink (DL). It
the evaluation results are used to balance the handling of false is defined as the average downlink received power on
positives and false negatives with respect to operator goals. the resource elements that carry cell specific reference
signals from the serving cell within the considered
IV. E VALUATION bandwidth.

In this section, the test network environment, test scenarios
and main experimental results of ARCA solution are presented.
A. Test network configuration
The experiment was done using a simulated LTE network
based on [12] with simulation parameters shown in Table
III. In the simulation, supervised learning approach was used
on 84 cells. The KPIs used and fault distribution data were
collected from manual RCA sessions conducted by experts in
the field using stratified sampling method. Though not used
in the training phase, the training data also contains an expert
assigned root cause per cell (ground truth). This information is
used during the verification of ARCA diagnosis results. Cells
with normal (HC abbreviation in Table IV) KPIs are filtered out
by the Profile Manager. In this simulation only 21 cells met the
prerequisites of the diagnosis phase. The diagnosed faults are
prioritized by the Pareto Analyzer and fed into respective SFs
that perform the actual corrective actions. The implementation
details of SFs which are used to perform corrective actions
is outside the scope of this paper. Details about them can be
found in [8][9] under self-optimization chapters.
• RSRQ: Reference Signal Received Quality. The KPI
depicts the quality of the pilot signals received in the
DL. Measured in dB, it is defined as the ratio between
RSRP and the wideband received signals from all base
stations in the carrier bandwidth plus thermal noise
(RSSI).
• HOSR: Handover Success Rate. Measured in percent-
ages, this KPI describes the network’s ability to enable
users to continue receiving the service and maintain
connection during movement. It is calculated as the
ratio between successful handover attempts to the total
number of handover attempts.
• E RAB RET: Used to evaluate network capability to
retain the service requested by a user for a desired
duration once the user is connected to the service. It
is measured in percentages and calculated as the ratio
of connections that have completed successfully to the
total number of completed connections.
• SINR: Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio. Mea-
sured in dB, this KPI is defined as the ratio between

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 the power of the desired data signal to the sum of the
inter cell interference powers plus noise. Generally,
this KPI gives an assessment of the long term signal
quality in the cell.
• AVG THROUGHPUT: Calculated as an average of
user throughput (Tu) on the basis of their SINR using
the following equation [4]:
Du
Tu = (1 − BLER(SIN R)). (9)
TTI
where BLER is the block error probability that de-
pends on the SINR of user u, Du is its data block
payload in bits and TTI is the transmission time
interval.
• 50 P ERC DIST : Depicts where the majority of
users are located with respect to the center of the
serving cell base station.
B. Experimental scenarios
1) Excessive antenna downtilt (EADT): This is a common
case especially in urban areas where, due to increased traffic,
operators tends to focus the antenna beam close to the base
station in order to increase cell capacity. Typical manifestations
of this fault include: high RSRP values close to the base
station while RSRQ and E RAB RET values on average
drop especially for users further away from the base station.
Often frequent handovers of users at the cell edge is also
experienced and subsequently, the number of users captured
in 50 PERC DIST also tends to be below average.
2) Coverage hole (CH): Represents an area where the
signal level of both the serving and allowed neighbor cell are
below the mandatory level required to maintain the service.
This might be caused for example by physical obstructions
such as new buildings in urban areas and hills and mountains in
rural areas. In some situations, unsuitable antenna parameters
or bad radio frequency (RF) planning may also create coverage
holes. The typical symptoms of this fault include low RSRP
reported by users in a certain part of the service area which
results in frequent call drops and radio link failures (RLFs).
3) Inter-system interference (ISI): It may occur in areas
covered by overlapping radio access technologies (RATs) such
as LTE, WCDMA and GSM. Areas experiencing this problem
typically register degradation in SINR, RSRQ, E RAB RET
and AVG THROUGHPUT KPIs due to excessive interference
among different RATs.
4) Too late handover (TLHO): It occurs during UE mobil-
ity when a source cell initiates a handover too late, or not at all.
Typically, this leads to a radio link failure in the source cell.
In the modeled case, the handover never happened although
a handover to the neighbor cell would have been possible
and desirable. Even though the ratio of connections that
have completed successfully to the total number of completed
connections shows a high HOSR value, the RSRQ degradation
indicates that the service quality the users are experiencing has
degraded while the RSRP in the cell also shows significant
degradation due to too long average distance of UEs from the
serving cell base station center as shown by 50 PERC DIST
KPI. Furthermore, since the cell is not performing handovers
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as early as required, it has higher than usual E RAB RET
which means that it is retaining users even with bad quality
instead of performing handovers to neighbor cells with better
signal quality.
5) Excessive antenna uptilt (EAUT): It appears as a side
effect of excessive uptilting of cell antennas. It is typically
experienced when the cell coverage starts reaching far beyond
its planned coverage area often causing islands of coverage
within the coverage area of another cell. During diagnosis,
cells having this fault typically show 50 PERC DIST KPI
value larger than normal. Consequently, the cell serves more
distant users than usual and this leads to degradation of SINR,
RSRQ and AVG THROUGHPUT. While this fault is common
in rural areas, it is also typical in urban areas, for example near
highways and water bodies. In both cases, this happens as an
unwanted side effect of cell coverage extension.
6) Cell outage (CO): Appears when a cell ceases to handle
any traffic. Common causes include hardware failure or pa-
rameter misconfiguration. Troubleshooting information include
hardware alarms and KPIs which typically show very low,
negligible or missing values for RSRP, RSRQ, SINR. Actual
KPI values depends on the type of outage, it can be partial or
complete.
TABLE IV: ARCA Diagnosis Mapping
Diagnosis ID Fault Name Fault Business
(DID) Abbreviation Priority
0 Healthy cell HC 0
1 Excessive antenna downtilt EADT 1
2 Coverage hole CH 1
3 Inter-system interference ISI 1.5
4 Too late handover TLHO 2.5
5 Excessive antenna uptilt EAUT 1
6 Cell outage CO 3
C. Performance evaluation metrics
Table IV is used to map internal diagnosis identifiers
(DIDs) used by the NBC to human readable names for visual-
ization and other purposes. The actual cell KPIs and obtained
diagnosis for each individual cell in the test scope are shown
in columns of Table V. Normalization of KPIs is a prerequisite
for our implementation of the NBC. KPI values are normalized
and mapped from numeric to categorical values such as, low
(L), high (H) and negligible or missing (−−) using if ... then ...
else expert mapping rules or default ranges presented in Table
VI. The preferences are a way that the operator can influence
the operation of ARCA by defining operating preferences that
suit their environment. In case ARCA needs more information,
such as neighbor or alarm information before completing a
diagnosis, additional information can be provided using an
additional input file or data source.
The performance of the proposed classifier is evaluated
using a confusion matrix table, accuracy and the Kappa statis-
tic. Because we are using supervised learning, the confusion
matrix makes it easy to see if the classifier is misclassifying
one class for another. Each column in the table represents the
instance in the predicted class while each row represents the
 TABLE V: ARCA Performance Evaluation Test Cases
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10 C11 C12 C13 C14 C15 C16 C17 C18 C19 C20 C21
E RAB RET L H - - H H H H H - - L L L L L H H H L -
HOSR L H - - H H H H H - - - - - - - H H H L -
RSRP H - H H - H H - - L L H H - H H - H - H -
RSRQ L L L L - - - L - - - H H H - H - - L L L
SINR - L - - - - H - H L L H H L L L - - - - L
AVG THROUGHPUT H H H H H - H - - L H - - L L L H - - - H
50 PERC DIST L L L L H H - H H H L H H H H - H H H H L
Diagnosis (DID) 1 1 1 1 4 4 4 4 4 5 6 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 6

TABLE VI: ARCA Algorithm Parameter Preferences

Parameter Operator Operator Parameter Description
Policy A Policy B
Scope 21 cells 21 cells Number of cells in test area
Exclusion scope [] [] Ids of cells excluded from analysis
Scope name prefix ARCA MAN ARCA CLOP RCA scope name prefix
Corrective action trigger strategy Manual Automatic Mode of triggering corrective action SON functions
Data statistical validity 1 week 1 week Minimum period of gathering network measurements
KPI summarization period Last hour Last hour KPI summarization period
KPI Thresholds Expert defined thresholds
RSRP [dBm] [-140,-44] Signal strength measurement range required to get LTE service
RSRQ [dB] [-19.5,-3.0] Signal quality measurement range required to maintain LTE service
SINR [dB] [13, >20] Recommended range for signal to interference and noise ratio
HOSR [%] 95.00 Recommended handover success rate threshold
E RAB RET [%] 98.00 Recommended retainability threshold
AVG THROUGHPUT [Kbps] [100, >150] Average cell throughput range threshold
50 PERC DIST [Km] [1.00, 5.00] 50th percentile distance of user location from the base station center
Addition Input
Additional ARCA input file: /home/arca/shared/additional arca input.json Optional input file with alarm, call trace and neighbor information

instances in an actual class (ground truth). According to the 2) Kappa Statistic: This metric is used in order to more
rules of confusion matrices, correct diagnoses lie along the left accurately asses the capability of the classifier by taking into
diagonal of the confusion matrix. All other non zero entries account correct classifications that might occur by chance.
in the table are misclassifications. Though it is easy to derive
various performance metrics from the confusion matrix shown According to the confusion matrix of the random classifier
in Table VII, for the sake of this demonstration, we highlight shown in Table VIII, we can see that only 1 out 4 faults with
only the most important metrics: DID 1 was correctly diagnosed and 4 out 9 faults with DID 4
were correctly diagnosed while the rest were all misdiagnosed.
A simple comparison of the two confusion matrices (Table
TABLE VII: ARCA Classifier Confusion Matrix VII and VIII) clearly show that ARCA has better diagnosis
DID 1 2 3 4 5 6 results (only 1 misdiagnosis) on the test dataset compared to
1 4 0 0 0 0 0 the random classifier.
2 0 2 0 0 0 0
3 0 0 3 0 0 0
4 0 0 0 9 0 0
TABLE VIII: Random Classifier Confusion Matrix
5 0 0 0 0 1 0
DID 1 2 3 4 5 6
6 1 0 0 0 0 1
1 1 0 1 2 0 0
2 0 0 0 2 0 0
1) Accuracy: Describes how often the classifier is correct. 3 1 0 0 2 0 0
It is calculated as: 4 2 1 1 4 0 1
tp + tn 5 0 0 0 1 0 0
P (c) = (10) 6 0 0 0 2 0 0
total instances
where P (c), tp and tn represents classifier accuracy, true
positive and true negative classification counts respectively. Kappa is calculated using:
Therefore, ARCA classification accuracy is calculated as:
20 P (c) − P (r)
P (c) = = 0.95 K= (11)
21 1 − P (r)

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 Fig. 4: Pareto Analysis
where the accuracy of the random classifier is:
5 the operator’s point of view, they would lose more money when
P (r) = = 0.24
21
0.95 − 0.24 0.71
K= = = 0.93
1 − 0.24 0.76
where K represents the Kappa statistic, P (c) represents the
accuracy of the ARCA classifier and P (r) represents the accu-
racy of the random classifier. A common evaluation reference
scale of the Kappa statistic is: 0.41-0.60 : Low, 0.61-0.80 :
Good, 0.81-1.00 : High.
Compared to previous studies, for example [4], were the
authors evaluated their results based on detection error rate or
on percentage of agreement only, we use confusion matrices
from which all other important metrics, such as percent agree-
ment (P (c) = 0.95) and Kappa (K = 0.93), can be calculated
to thoroughly evaluate the proposed solution.
D. Pareto analysis results
Fig. 4 shows the ranking of diagnosed faults. From top
left to the right, the first graph shows the total diagnosed
faults while the second graph shows the proposed ranking
according to basic (frequency) Pareto analysis respectively.
Using this method, ARCA proposed to fix TLHO, EADT and
ISI in order to achieve about 80% of the cumulative value
of fault fixing. The bottom graphs show the ranking where
each fault frequency is multiplied by a weighting factor which
corresponds to its priority to the business as defined in the
last column of Table IV. The severity minimum is 0 and the
maximum is 3. Using this approach, we note that ARCA
regards CO to be a more severe fault than EADT, consequently,
it proposes fixing this issue first according to the bottom Pareto
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chart. One interpretation of this behavior would be that from
cells remain in outage for a longer time than when they are
over tuned to increase capacity through excessive downtilting
of antennas.
In summary, it can be seen that by only fixing TLHO,
CO and ISI from the total number of diagnosed faults, the
business can gain about 80% of the total benefit of fixing all the
diagnosed faults. From this, we can conclude that the business
can maximize ROI by applying Pareto analysis [13] to RCA
results.
V. R ELATED WORK AND DISCUSSION
Self-healing (SH) studies are scarce and fragmented. In
order to unify the fragmented literature and concepts, R. Barco
et al [1] proposed among other things, a conceptual framework
were the main terms and functions of self-healing are clarified
and unified. The authors also outlined the current state of the
art and concluded by describing the key research challenges
still open in the field. In [2], the authors presented an inte-
grated detection and diagnosis framework. They use profiles
constructed from historical network data as the foundation of
their detection mechanism. Their diagnosis mechanism uses
reports. Reports are expert associations of faults to root causes
based on analysis of historical network data. Their work is
similar to ours as we both aim to automate RCA. We both use
the profile concept to learn expected values. On the other hand,
our work differs from theirs in many ways, for example, they
use averages in profile calculations while we use percentiles
to make our calculations in order to prevent outliers from
distorting the distribution of actual training data values. As
a contrasting example between the two methods, consider the
following user to site distances measured in kilometers in a
rural area D = 16, 14, 14, 56. The average is 25km while
the 50th percentile is 15km. Between the two results, we can
calculate a difference of 10km and by visually inspecting the
data, we can validate the benefit of using our approach that
indeed at least half the users are less than 15km from the
site not 25km. This information can be used, for example,
to improve cell capacity and signal quality by downtilting
the antenna in question so that the antenna beam covers less
distance while continuing to serve the majority of users in the
service area. Furthermore, we also use a Chi-squared test to
detect significant deviations of observed from expected KPI
values learned by the detection mechanism. Unlike having
to set strict threshold values, this makes the system more
stable by only triggering when there has been a significant
deviation from expected values. The significance level used in
our research is 5% (α = 0.05). In addition, they use reports
while we use a probabilistic classifier based on Bayesian
theorem. The NBC makes it possible to build an RCA classifier
that can continuously learn and adapt the diagnosis as more
evidence emerges in order to increase RCA accuracy. Unlike
in the reports based classifier, the ability to work with missing
and uncertain data expressed in terms of probabilities makes
the NBC more suitable for automated RCA diagnosis were
it is common to have input data missing or incomplete. On
the other hand, a major shortcoming of NBC is its naive
assumption of independence among features used to build
the classification model. This is typically not true in reality,
but nevertheless, NBC has yielded very successful results
in various applications which require high performance and
accuracy with large datasets [3] [6]. One possible explanation
for its success could be that, in order to function, the NBC
does not need very accurate probabilities which are anyway
very hard to calculate in most real use cases. For NBC based
diagnosis, it is enough that the classifier can find the MAP
hypothesis based on the given representative probabilities. In
[4] a self-organizing map (SOM) based root cause analysis
tool for LTE networks is proposed. From the goal perspective,
this work is quite similar to our work. Major differences with
our solution are related to the architecture and implementation
aspects, for example, we use NBC while they use SOM
for diagnosis. Their solution uses the concept of silhouette
index for refining the diagnosis decisions while we use Pareto
analysis to do the same. In [5] the authors proposed a solu-
tion for SON conflict diagnosis in heterogeneous networks.
In [7] the authors explain the ideas behind the expectation
maximization (EM) algorithm which can be useful for solving
classification problems. In [6] the author explored usage of
Bayes belief networks in industrial failure mode encoding
analysis (BN-FMEA). The author concluded that BN met the
requirement of industrial FMEA standards and requirements to
represent both statistical and causal dependencies of a system
and its stakeholders. In [3] a root cause deconvolution (RCD)
framework for learning the distribution of root causes of failing
devices from production test results was developed using a
layout-aware diagnosis solution based on a Bayesian network
model.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented a solution for automating root
cause analysis of cellular network faults called ARCA. It
uses a Chi-squared test to detect significant cell performance
143
deviation from expected values captured in statistical profiles.
The solution uses a naive Bayesian classifier to perform
automatic root cause diagnosis of detected faults. Diagnosed
faults are ranked using Pareto analysis. SON functions are
then triggered to compensate or eliminate the root cause of
diagnosed faults. Finally, every root cause corrective action
performed is evaluated based on applicable KPIs monitored.
The main benefits of the proposed solution include:
• Adaptive continuous learning which increases RCA
accuracy and expert knowledge reuse.
• Ability to work with missing and uncertain data ex-
pressed in terms of probabilities.
• High performance and accuracy even with large
datasets.
In lab tests, ARCA showed a diagnosis accuracy of 95.2% and
a very good Kappa statistic of 93.0%.
Building on this research, we plan to look into Deep Learn-
ing algorithms that can be used to advance the capabilities of
emerging network optimization tools in LTE-A and 5G.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Nokia Networks and iSON
Manager Self-Optimization team for their support during this
research.
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