Measuring the resiliency of cellular base station deployments

Abstract

The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) has defined resiliency as the ability of a network to withstand the loss of assets and to recover quickly from such losses. How to measure the resiliency of a base station deployment is an important consideration for network planners and operators. In this paper, we propose a resiliency measurement method in conjunction with a performance metric such as coverage or supported throughput, where we define the resiliency as the maximum number of sites that can fail before the metric falls below a minimum acceptable threshold. Because the number of combinations of failures increases exponentially with respect to the number of sites in a given deployment, we introduce an algorithm that generates estimates of the lowest, highest, and average values of the metric for a given failure count while examining a subset of the possible failure combinations. We use an example deployment to demonstrate how the resiliency metric can be used to identify sites that have a disproportionate impact on performance; the network planner can harden these sites or, for a future deployment, adjust the site placement to reduce the effect of the high-impact sites.

On the resilience of cellular networks: how can national roaming help?

“…When it comes to the analyzing the resilience of a network, the closest studies to ours are [26], [46]. Yan et al [46] propose the metric Tower Outage Impact Predictor (TOIP) to quantify the impact of a failure of a cell tower on the number of served cellular users.…”

“…Moreover, our focus is also on the potential resilience improvement due to infrastructure sharing among MNOs in the same country. Contrary to [26], our work investigates both coverage as service quality as metrics, and combines models with several data sources to assess resilience.…”

“…While the resilience literature is broad in other areas of critical infrastructures, to the best of our knowledge, there are only few studies on quantifying cellular network's resilience Authors are with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS), University of Twente, The Netherlands, Corresponding author's e-mail:l.weedage@utwente.nl at a national scale such as [26] and [46], the former defining resilience as "the maximum number of sites that can fail before the performance metric of interest falls below a minimum acceptable threshold", and the latter using the number of served users as the resilience metric. Since both ensuring coverage and satisfying quality of service (QoS) are important, we use fraction of disconnected population (FDP) and fraction of satisfied population (FSP) to quantify the resilience of an MNO.…”

Game theoretic efficient radio resource allocation in 5G resilient networks: A data driven approach

“…The technical specifications of a 5G resilient networks have not yet been standardized but such networks are needed to provide a high level of reliability and resilience to failures to guarantee the availability to the customers such as common public and public safety responders when needed. One of the works in the recent literature has investigated the resiliency of cellular BS deployment through a measurement method in conjunction with a performance metric such as coverage or supported throughput.…”

Software defined networking (SDN) for reliable user connectivity in 5G networks

“…They showed that by incorporating fault tolerance mechanisms in UMTS networks can achieve substantial gains in network reliability. In LTE/EPC networks, a major concern was dedicated to the resiliency of base stations [5] [6]. The 3GPP technical specification [7] proposes some basic restoration mechanisms for gateway failures.…”