LTE Network Management System for Service Outage Detection
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Solution Overview
Problem
In 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, service outages and degradations are difficult to detect due to self-healing mechanisms, leading to prolonged undetected issues and requiring significant manual troubleshooting efforts, increasing maintenance costs.
Innovation Solution
A method and apparatus for remotely detecting, isolating, and restoring wireless service outages and degradations in base stations, enabling automated detection and minimal manual intervention through a Rule Management Module that correlates alarms, performs root cause analysis, and executes recovery tasks within the LTE network.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If self-healing mechanisms are implemented in LTE networks, then service continuity is improved, but service outage detection capability deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a network management system as an intermediary that correlates alarms and performance data from multiple sources to detect service outages. This mediator can identify outages even when self-healing mechanisms mask direct failure signals, by analyzing patterns across neighboring cells and network elements.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback mechanisms by continuously monitoring service quality indicators and alarm correlations, then using this information to detect outages. The feedback loop enables the system to identify when self-healing has masked a failure by detecting anomalies in service quality metrics that deviate from expected patterns.
2Measurement precision
If manual troubleshooting is performed for service outages, then problem resolution accuracy is improved, but maintenance time and costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-correlating alarms and pre-analyzing performance data to identify potential outage causes before manual intervention is needed. The network management system prepares diagnostic information and isolates the affected network elements in advance, so that when an outage occurs, the root cause is already identified or narrowly pinpointed.
Solution Approach 2:
The system enables self-service by automatically detecting outages, correlating alarms, and identifying root causes without requiring manual analysis. The network management system performs troubleshooting functions autonomously, reducing both the time and expertise required for manual intervention while maintaining high accuracy in problem resolution.
3Productivity
If automated detection systems are implemented, then detection speed is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies universality by designing a network management system that performs multiple functions: alarm correlation, performance monitoring, outage detection, and root cause analysis. This multi-functional system achieves fast detection across various outage scenarios without requiring separate specialized systems for each function, thereby limiting the increase in overall system complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and apparatus for enabling a wireless communication service provider to remotely provide wireless network service outage and/or degradation detection, isolation, and restoration relating to a base station are disclosed. For example, the method detects a wireless service problem, and isolates the wireless service problem to a base station of a plurality of base stations of the wireless communication network, wherein the wireless service problem comprises a wireless service degradation. The method then performs a recovery task remotely on the base station to address the wireless service degradation.