10.4 Self-Healing
Within the telecommunication industry, the operation of the network and in particular troubleshooting, are seen as major cost factor. Self-healing standardization is mainly addressed by SA5; at the time of writing there is one main 3GPP technical specification [10].
10.4.1 Cell Outage Compensation
Cell outage refers to the case where eNodeB becomes unavailable in an unplanned way due to hardware or software problems or in a planned way due to network maintenance or energy saving purposes. The loss of network coverage can be partly compensated by the adjacent eNodeBs by increasing the transmit powers, for example, the pilot channel power, or by reducing the antenna downtilt as illustrated in Figure 10.12.
Figure 10.12 eNodeB1 outage compensation.
Whether power or antenna downtilt is used depends on availability of RET-capable antennas in the system and used power levels in the base stations. To compensate the failed area, the most convenient action is to increase the failed-cell neighbours' power transmission. On the other end the base stations power are usually set to the maximum value. If this is the case, the re-adjustment of the tilt can be considered, assuming that Remote Electrical Tilt (RET) is available.
As the cell failure leads to service unavailability it is of outmost importance to recover very fast from the failure; usually the outage is detected by ...
Get LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
