A Machine Learning framework for Sleeping Cell Detection in a Smart-city IoT Telecommunications Infrastructure

The smooth operation of largely deployed Internet of Things (IoT) applications will depend on, among other things, effective infrastructure failure detection. Access failures in wireless network Base Stations (BSs) produce a phenomenon called "sleeping cells", which can render a cell catatonic without triggering any alarms or provoking immediate effects on cell performance, making them difficult to discover. To detect this kind of failure, we propose a Machine Learning (ML) framework based on the use of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) statistics from the BS under study, as well as those of the neighboring BSs with propensity to have their performance affected by the failure. A simple way to define neighbors is to use adjacency in Voronoi diagrams. In this paper, we propose a much more realistic approach based on the nature of radio-propagation and the way devices choose the BS to which they send access requests. We gather data from large-scale simulators that use real location data for BSs and IoT devices and pose the detection problem as a supervised binary classification problem. We measure the effects on the detection performance by the size of time aggregations of the data, the level of traffic and the parameters of the neighborhood definition. The Extra Trees and Naive Bayes classifiers achieve Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Area Under the Curve (AUC) scores of 0.996 and 0.993, respectively, with False Positive Rate (FPR) under 5 %. The proposed framework holds potential for other pattern recognition tasks in smart-city wireless infrastructures, that would enable the monitoring, prediction and improvement of the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by IoT applications.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Access Journa

GA-AdaBoostSVM classifier empowered wireless network diagnosis

Abstract Self-healing is one of the most important parts in self-organizing mobile communication network. It focuses on detecting the decline of service quality and finding out the cause of network anomalies and repairing it with high automation. Diagnosis is a particularly important task which identifies the fault cause of problematic cells or regions. To perform the diagnosis, this paper presents two modified ensemble classifiers by using Support Vector Machine (SVM) with different kernels, i.e., SVM with the radial basis function (RBF) kernel (RBFSVM in short) and SVM with the linear kernel (LSVM in short), as component classifier in Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), and we call the two ensemble classifiers as Adaptive Boosting based on RBFSVM (AdaBoostRBFSVM in short) and Adaptive Boosting based on linear kernel (AdaBoostLSVM in short). Different with previous AdaBoostSVM classifiers using weak component classifiers, in this paper, the performance of the classifiers is adaptively improved by using moderately accurate SVM classifiers (the training error is less than 50%). To solve the accuracy/diversity dilemma in AdaBoost and get good classification performance, the training error threshold is regulated to adjust the diversity of classifier, and the parameters of SVM (regularization parameter C and Gaussian width σ) are changed to control the accuracy of classifier. The accuracy and diversity will be well balanced through reasonable parameter adjustment strategy. Results show that the proposed approaches outperform individual SVM approaches and show good generalization performance. The AdaBoostLSVM classifier has higher accuracy and stability than LSVM classifier. Compared with RBFSVM, the undetected rate and diagnosis error rate of AdaBoostRBFSVM decrease slightly, but the false positive rate does reduce a lot. It means that the AdaBoostRBFSVM classifier is indeed available and can greatly reduce the number of normal class samples that have been wrongly classified. Therefore, the two ensemble classifiers based on the SVM component classifier can improve the generalization performance by reasonably adjusting the parameters. To set the parameter values of component classifiers in a more reasonable and effective way, genetic algorithm is introduced to find the set of parameter values for the best classification accuracy of AdaBoostSVM, and the new ensemble classifier is called AdaboostSVM based on genetic algorithm (GA-AdaboostSVM in short) (including AdaboostLSVM based on genetic algorithm and AdaboostRBFSVM based on genetic algorithm). Results show that GA-AdaboostSVM classifiers have a lower overall error than AdaboostSVM classifiers. Genetic algorithm could help to achieve a more optimal performance of the ensemble classifiers