Location-Awareness for Failure Management in Cellular Networks: An Integrated Approach

Recent years have seen the proliferation of different techniques for outdoor and, especially, indoor positioning. Still being a field in development, localization is expected to be fully pervasive in the next few years. Although the development of such techniques is driven by the commercialization of location-based services (e.g., navigation), its application to support cellular management is considered to be a key approach for improving its resilience and performance. When different approaches have been defined for integrating location information into the failure management activities, they commonly ignore the increase in the dimensionality of the data as well as their integration into the complete flow of networks failure management. Taking this into account, the present work proposes a complete integrated approach for location-aware failure management, covering the gathering of network and positioning data, the generation of metrics, the reduction in the dimensionality of such data, and the application of inference mechanisms. The proposed scheme is then evaluated by system-level simulation in ultra-dense scenarios, showing the capabilities of the approach to increase the reliability of the supported diagnosis process as well as reducing its computational cost.