Leveraging intelligence from network CDR data for interference aware energy consumption minimization

Cell densification is being perceived as the panacea for the imminent capacity crunch. However, high aggregated energy consumption and increased inter-cell interference (ICI) caused by densification, remain the two long-standing problems. We propose a novel network orchestration solution for simultaneously minimizing energy consumption and ICI in ultra-dense 5G networks. The proposed solution builds on a big data analysis of over 10 million CDRs from a real network that shows there exists strong spatio-temporal predictability in real network traffic patterns. Leveraging this we develop a novel scheme to pro-actively schedule radio resources and small cell sleep cycles yielding substantial energy savings and reduced ICI, without compromising the users QoS. This scheme is derived by formulating a joint Energy Consumption and ICI minimization problem and solving it through a combination of linear binary integer programming, and progressive analysis based heuristic algorithm. Evaluations using: 1) a HetNet deployment designed for Milan city where big data analytics are used on real CDRs data from the Telecom Italia network to model traffic patterns, 2) NS-3 based Monte-Carlo simulations with synthetic Poisson traffic show that, compared to full frequency reuse and always on approach, in best case, proposed scheme can reduce energy consumption in HetNets to 1/8th while providing same or better Qo

Low-Power Appliance Monitoring Using Factorial Hidden Markov Models

To optimize the energy utilization, intelligent energy management solutions require appliance-specific consumption statistics. One can obtain such information by deploying smart power outlets on every device of interest, however it incurs extra hardware cost and installation complexity. Alternatively, a single sensor can be used to measure total electricity consumption and thereafter disaggregation algorithms can be applied to obtain appliance specific usage information. In such a case, it is quite challenging to discern low-power appliances in the presence of high-power loads. To improve the recognition of low-power appliance states, we propose a solution that makes use of circuit-level power measurements. We examine the use of a specialized variant of Hidden Markov Model (HMM) known as Factorial HMM (FHMM) to recognize appliance specific load patterns from the aggregated power measurements. Further, we demonstrate that feature concatenation can improve the disaggregation performance of the model allowing it to identify device states with an accuracy of 90% for binary and 80% for multi-state appliances. Through experimental evaluations, we show that our solution performs better than the traditional event based approach. In addition, we develop a prototype system that allows real-time monitoring of appliance states

A comparison of generative and discriminative appliance recognition models for load monitoring

Appliance-level Load Monitoring (ALM) is essential, not only to optimize energy utilization, but also to promote energy awareness amongst consumers through real-time feedback mechanisms. Non-intrusive load monitoring is an attractive method to perform ALM that allows tracking of appliance states within the aggregated power measurements. It makes use of generative and discriminative machine learning models to perform load identification. However, particularly for low-power appliances, these algorithms achieve sub-optimal performance in a real world environment due to ambiguous overlapping of appliance power features. In our work, we report a performance comparison of generative and discriminative Appliance Recognition (AR) models for binary and multi-state appliance operations. Furthermore, it has been shown through experimental evaluations that a significant performance improvement in AR can be achieved if we make use of acoustic information generated as a by-product of appliance activity. We demonstrate that our a discriminative model FF-AR trained using a hybrid feature set which is a catenation of audio and power features improves the multi-state AR accuracy up to 10 %, in comparison to a generative FHMM-AR model

A SON Solution for Sleeping Cell Detection Using Low-Dimensional Embedding of MDT Measurements

Automatic detection of cells which are in outage has been identified as one of the key use cases for Self Organizing Networks (SON) for emerging and future generations of cellular systems. A special case of cell outage, referred to as Sleeping Cell (SC) remains particularly challenging to detect in state of the art SON because in this case cell goes into outage or may perform poorly without triggering an alarm for Operation and Maintenance (O&M) entity. Consequently, no SON compensation function can be launched unless SC situation is detected via drive tests or through complaints registered by the affected customers. In this paper, we present a novel solution to address this problem that makes use of minimization of drive test (MDT) measurements recently standardized by 3GPP and NGMN. To overcome the processing complexity challenge, the MDT measurements are projected to a low-dimensional space using multidimensional scaling method. Then we apply state of the art k-nearest neighbor and local outlier factor based anomaly detection models together with pre-processed MDT measurements to profile the network behaviour and to detect SC. Our numerical results show that our proposed solution can automate the SC detection process with 93 accuracy

Effects of gibberellic acid, potassium nitrate and calcium sulfate on pomegranate fruit splitting and fruit characteristics

Pomegranate fruit splitting is one of the major problems of production which leads to economic and quality losses. Cultivars with thin peel such as ‘Kadru’ are more susceptible to this disorder. The present study was carried out in a completely randomized block design to evaluate the influence of foliar application of gibberellic acid (GA3), potassium nitrate (KNO3) and calcium sulfate (CaSO4) on alleviating fruit splitting of ‘Kadru’ cultivar in addition to some physical and quality characteristics in an orchard in Farugh region (Fars Province, Iran). Uniform healthy pomegranate trees were chosen for the experiment. Treatments included the foliar application of GA3 (50, 100 and 200 mg L-1), CaSO4 (2500, 3000 and 3500 mg L-1) and KNO3 (5000, 10,000 and 15,000 mg L-1) in May and early September in two successive years. The results indicated that most of the treatments significantly increased the number of healthy fruits, however, the application of KNO3 at 5000 mg L-1 concentration did not cause a significant response. Foliar application of GA3 (100 mg L-1) was evaluated as the most effective treatment in the reduction of the fruit splitting. Also, KNO3 (10,000 mg L-1) treatment mitigated the percentage of fruit splitting and had a beneficial impact on the weight of 100 arils, percentage of the edible part of the fruits and ascorbic acid concentration. Therefore, foliar application of KNO3 (10,000 mg L-1) is recommendable for the reduction of the pomegranate fruit splitting

Acoustic and Device Feature Fusion for Load Recognition

Appliance-specific Load Monitoring (LM) provides a possible solution to the problem of energy conservation which is becoming increasingly challenging, due to growing energy demands within offices and residential spaces. It is essential to perform automatic appliance recognition and monitoring for optimal resource utilization. In this paper, we study the use of non-intrusive LM methods that rely on steady-state appliance signatures for classifying most commonly used office appliances, while demonstrating their limitation in terms of accurately discerning the low-power devices due to overlapping load signatures. We propose a multilayer decision architecture that makes use of audio features derived from device sounds and fuse it with load signatures acquired from energy meter. For the recognition of device sounds, we perform feature set selection by evaluating the combination of time-domain and FFT-based audio features on the state of the art machine learning algorithms. The highest recognition performance however is shown by support vector machines, for the device and audio recognition experiments. Further, we demonstrate that our proposed feature set which is a concatenation of device audio feature and load signature significantly improves the device recognition accuracy in comparison to the use of steady-state load signatures only

A cell outage management framework for dense heterogeneous networks

In this paper, we present a novel cell outage management (COM) framework for heterogeneous networks with split control and data planes-a candidate architecture for meeting future capacity, quality-of-service, and energy efficiency demands. In such an architecture, the control and data functionalities are not necessarily handled by the same node. The control base stations (BSs) manage the transmission of control information and user equipment (UE) mobility, whereas the data BSs handle UE data. An implication of this split architecture is that an outage to a BS in one plane has to be compensated by other BSs in the same plane. Our COM framework addresses this challenge by incorporating two distinct cell outage detection (COD) algorithms to cope with the idiosyncrasies of both data and control planes. The COD algorithm for control cells leverages the relatively larger number of UEs in the control cell to gather large-scale minimization-of-drive-test report data and detects an outage by applying machine learning and anomaly detection techniques. To improve outage detection accuracy, we also investigate and compare the performance of two anomaly-detecting algorithms, i.e., k-nearest-neighbor- and local-outlier-factor-based anomaly detectors, within the control COD. On the other hand, for data cell COD, we propose a heuristic Grey-prediction-based approach, which can work with the small number of UE in the data cell, by exploiting the fact that the control BS manages UE-data BS connectivity and by receiving a periodic update of the received signal reference power statistic between the UEs and data BSs in its coverage. The detection accuracy of the heuristic data COD algorithm is further improved by exploiting the Fourier series of the residual error that is inherent to a Grey prediction model. Our COM framework integrates these two COD algorithms with a cell outage compensation (COC) algorithm that can be applied to both planes. Our COC solution utilizes an actor-critic-based reinforcement learning algorithm, which optimizes the capacity and coverage of the identified outage zone in a plane, by adjusting the antenna gain and transmission power of the surrounding BSs in that plane. The simulation results show that the proposed framework can detect both data and control cell outage and compensate for the detected outage in a reliable manner

Can Temperature be Used as a Predictor of Data Traffic? A Real Network Big Data Analysis

The proliferation of mobile devices and big data has made it possible to understand the human movements and forecasts of precise and intelligent short and long-term data consumption of services like call, sms, or internet data which has interesting and promising applications in modern cellular networks. Human nature and moods are known to be synonymous with the physical attributes of mother nature such as temperature. The change in those physical features affects the human routines and activities such as cellular data consumptions. The future of telecommunication lies in the exploration of heap of information and data available to companies and inferring the valuable results through extensive analysis. In this paper, we analyze three main traits of cellular activity: sms, call, and internet. This paper investigates whether the relationship between the temperature and the cellular data consumption exits or not. This work introduces a novel approach to identify the strength of relationship between the temperature and cellular activity (sms, call, internet) and discuss the methods to quantify the relationship using correlation method. The real network CDR big data set - Milano Grid data set is used to analyze the behavior of the cellular activity with respect to temperature