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Root Cause Detection of Call drops in Live GSM

Network
K.R. Sudhindra

V. Sridhar

P.E.S College of Engineering


Bangalore, India

P.E.S. College of Engineering


Mandya,India

sudhindra_kr@rediffmail.com

venusridhar@yahoo.com

All the previous works implicitly consider that an appropriate


radio planning has been carried out and there is no equipment
failure or network outage. Such assumptions lead to consider
that calls are dropped only due to the failure of the handover
procedure. The analytical models which relate handovers with
traffic characteristics were very useful in the early phase of
mobile network deployment and are not very effective in a
well-established cellular network. The call drops due to lack of
radio resources will be a rare event in a well established
optimized network. Hence new analytical tools and models to
study the call dropping phenomenon as a function of call
arrival rate, call duration, propagation conditions, equipment
hardware faults and improper radio parameter settings are
needed. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the
call drops reasons in live GSM network and to propose a novel
method for root cause detection of call drops using pattern
recognition.

Abstract Call drop rate in GSM (Global System for Mobile


Communication) network is an important KPI that directly
affects customer satisfaction. The delay in identification of exact
call drop reason because of multiple reasons involved in it would
result in poor performance of the network. The Radio frequency
call drop (RF Call drop), handover failure call drops and LAPD (
Link Access Protocol on D-Channel) call drops are the common
types of call drops that are observed from the live GSM network.
The procedure of resolving call drops has been discussed and a
novel approach to identify exact root cause of call drops using
pattern recognition technique is proposed.
Keywords- TCH call drops, KPI, Traffic, Optimization

I.

INTRODUCTION

GSM was the worlds first cellular system to specify digital


modulation and network level architectures and is the worlds
most popular 2G technology. TCH (Traffic channel) drop rate
is one of the major KPI that affect the performance of live
GSM network. The TCH drop is the abrupt disconnection of
call after traffic channel is allocated. Its minimization is the
typical result of many optimization procedures applied to
several service aspects as: the maximization of service
coverage area and of network usage, the minimization of
interference, minimization of congestion and the optimum
traffic balancing among the different frequency layers (e.g.,
900 and 1800 MHz in the European GSM standard).The
multiple causes of call drops in live network will delay the
process of call drop detection and its elimination from the
network which will result in poor customer satisfaction.

II.

A. RF call drop due to downlink failure


According to GSM specification, MS (Mobile station ) has
a timer S (T100) which is assigned with an initial value called
RLT (radio link timeout) through BCCH channel (Broadcast
control channel). In the presence of severe interference in
downlink, MS cannot correctly decode the SACCH (slow
associated control channel) which carries system information
message. S is decreased by 1 when MS fails to decode
SACCH message and is increased by 2 whenever it decodes
SACCH message. S will not exceed the initial value defined by
RLT. When S value reaches zero, MS will release radio
resource connection abruptly which will results in call drop.

The relation of call drops with handover and its effects on


performance is exclusively discussed in [1]. The effect of user
mobility on call drops in live network considering different
patterns for user mobility was discussed in [2]. The influence
on handover failures on call drops for different classes of calls
are studied in [3, 4]. In [5] starting from the statistical analysis
of data in a real cellular network, the lognormal hypothesis for
distribution of the call holding time of both the normally
terminated and the dropped calls has been verified. The
phenomena which cause the conversation interruption have
been classified, verifying that handover failure become
negligible in a well-established mobile telecommunication
network.

978-1-4577-0255-6/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

CLASSIFICATION OF CALL DROPS

The RF loss call drop (radio link failure call drop),


Handover failure call drop and LAPD call drops are the
common types of call drops that can be quantized from Base
station subsystem (BSS) of GSM network.

B. RF call drop due to uplink failure


The uplink failure parameter monitored by system is
link_fail. When the site cannot correctly decode a SACCH
message due to severe uplink interference, the timer (the
timers maximum value is defined by link_fail) is decreased by
1; when the site correctly decodes a SACCH message, the

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TENCON 2011

timer is increased by 2. When the timer value is zero, the site


stops transmitting downlink SACCH and starts the rr_t3109
timer (rr_t3109>T100). When T100 of MS is timeout, MS
returns to idle mode and call drop occurs. The site releases the
radio channel when the rr_t3109 timer is timeout and BSC
(Base station controller) will send a Clear request message to
MSC (Mobile Switching center). Either uplink failure or
downlink failure will stop sending SACCH to the opposite end
which results in radio link time out and call drops.
Figure 2. T3103 Timeout ( inter -cell handover failure)

C. Reasons for RF Call drop:


1. Existence of weak coverage area and weak radio signal.
2. Intra-network interference.
3. Unreasonable radio parameter settings.
4. Equipment hardware faults such as low output power of
the power amplifier, large difference among different
carrier transmission power, carrier transmitter fault,
combiner fault and splitter fault.

Figure 3. T8 Timeout ( inter -cell handover failure under different BSC)

5. Faults in antenna feeder system. For example, two antennae


in the cell have different inclination and azimuth
respectively; VSWR (voltage standing wave ratio) of
antenna feeder is big; antenna inclination is unreasonable,
which causes too big the coverage range or cross-cell
coverage forms the remote isolated island effect and results
in call drops.

E. Reasons of Handover Failure Call drop


Optimization of handover calls drop need to be
implemented together with optimization of handover success
rate, especially the handover-out success rate.
The following are reasons of handover failure call drop:
1. Existence of interference such as intra-network interference
due to unreasonable frequency planning and other external
interference.

6. Weak battery power.


D. Handover failure Call drop
If MS receives handover command or assignment message
(BSC starts relevant handover control timer) but fails to
handover to the destination cell and does not return to the
original cell either, then it results in handover failure call drops.
Here MS fails to occupy the destination cell channel and sends
handover complete or assignment complete message, neither
does MS returns to the original cell channel and sends
handover failure or assignment failure message. In this case
MS is disconnected from the network. At this moment, the
handover control timer of BSC will be timeout and notify MSC
to clear release, and count this exception event as handover
failure call drop. BSC handover control timers can be divided
into: T8 timer timeout (inter-cell handover under different
BSC), T3103 timer timeout (inter-cell handover under a BSC),
T3107 timer timeout (intra-cell handover). The signaling flow
of handover failure drop for different cases is shown in Fig. 1,
2 and 3.

2. Equipment hardware fault, such as clock fault in destination


cell or in source cell, low output power of the power
amplifier, large difference among different transmitters
transmission power, transmitter fault, combiner fault, and
divider fault.
4. Unreasonable radio parameter settings.
F. LAPD Call drop
The LAPD is a signaling layer 2 protocol which is defined
in CCITT Q.920/921 and existed between BTS (Base
transceiver station and BSC (Base Station Controller). LAPD
works in the Asynchronous Balanced Mode (ABM). This mode
is totally balanced (no master/slave relationship). Each station
may initialize, supervise, recover from errors, and send frames
at any time. When LAPD link is broken, the call-in-progress on
the carrier will be interrupted.
G. Reasons of LAPD call drop
1. Site transmission problems, such as transmission
interruption or unstable transmission (intermittent).

Figure 1. T3107 Timeout ( intra -cell handover failure)

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2.

Site-side hardware fault, such as unreliable E1 cable,


CMM (Control and Maintenance module) fault, and
backplane connection fault, etc.

3.

BSC-side hardware fault such as LAPD processing


board fault may result in LAPD Call drop.

III.

However, the limitation of the frequency domain features is


that they often require reliable baseline spectrum, which is
difficult to obtain due to the large number of operating features
[8]. The frequency domain representation of signal, parametric
modeling and wavelet decomposition could be used to extract
unique features required for pattern recognition

TCH CALL DROP HANDLING FLOW

The cells affecting with severe call drops in the network


could be identified by either observing daily performance
reports or by customer feedback. The first step in resolving call
drops is to classify the call drops under RF, LAPD and
hardware issues related categories. After classification of call
drops under different categories, the root cause for the call
drops and its removal could be done effectively by following
the steps depicted in the flow chart as shown in fig. 4.

D. Pattern Recognition
Once the incoming signals have been reduced in the feature
extraction phase the next step is to identify this data based on
pretrained information. The training phase involves collecting
TCH call drops for 12 days with a sampling period of 15
minutes for different hardware causes discussed earlier. The
collected data is recorded and various feature extraction
techniques will be performed on it. The resulting information is
to be used as the training set for either a neural network or a
statistical model which is the basis for identifying root cause
resulted with same hardware fault. There are many kinds of
neural network and statistical models which are suitable for this
application. Both the types of identification will be tested for
best results. The statistical method involves classifying an
unknown vector as belonging to a cluster to which it is closest.
The clusters are based on values obtained from the training
data set. Deciding which cluster is closest to the vector is made
by selecting an appropriate norm. The Euclidean and
Transformed Euclidean norms were tested in [10] with the
Mahalanobis distance providing the best results in that study.
This method found to be more effective and has some
advantages over the neural network approach mainly in speed
of the training.

A. Root cause detection of call drops using pattern


recognition
The traditional method identifying the root cause of call
drops and its subsequent elimination rely on the predefined
procedure discussed in the previous section. The discussed
procedure takes more time to find the exact cause of the call
drops in live network and results in high customer
dissatisfaction. A novel approach of detecting root cause of call
drops using pattern recognition technique is proposed which
could be used as supporting tool during optimization process.
The block diagram of proposed system is shown in Fig. 5.
B. Time domain representation of TCH call drops
There are number of hardware or software related problems
in the network that results in huge call drops. The four major
hardware faults such as HDLC (High Level Data Link Control)
communication between CMB (control and maintenance
board) and FUC(frame unit control) broken, HW (Highway
cable )link broken, Abis control link broken alarm and
PA(Power Amplifier) forward Power (3 db) alarm in the BSC
will be considered as four different causes of call drops in the
proposed system. The TCH call drop numbers due to four
different causes collected for duration of 12 days with a
sampling time of 15 minutes under one BSC are represented in
time domain as shown in fig. 6, fig. 7, fig. 8 and fig. 9 and will
be used as input for proposed root cause detection system. The
time domain representation TCH call drops shows unique
characteristics for different hardware faults which are
significant finding that could be used for feature extraction
required for root cause identification.

IV.

CONCLUSION

The different types of TCH call drops in live GSM network


is discussed along with the possible solution to reduce it. It was
found that the RF and Handover failure call drops can be
eliminated by providing proper coverage, ensuring the proper
radio frequency planning, maintaining hardware components
and by fine tuning radio parameters. The LAPD Call drops can
be reduced by supporting stable transmission network. The
time series representation of TCH call drops shows unique
characteristics for different hardware faults which could be
used to extract features for identifying root cause of call drops.
A novel method to identify the root cause of TCH call drops
using pattern recognition is proposed which would result in fast
elimination of TCH call drops from the network and thereby
improving overall customer satisfaction.

C. Feature Extraction
The quantity of data being gathered makes it cumbersome
to work directly with the time domain represented TCH call
drops at the pattern recognition phase. The strategy is to reduce
this information down to smaller set of identifying
characteristics by means of various feature extraction
algorithms. The information extracted is still enough to
describe the signal but with a smaller set of data. Each time
series representation of TCH call drop trend is a discrete time
series y(k). The root cause detection depends on features that
are extracted from TCH call drop trend represented in time
domain. In the time domain, available features are root-meansquare (RMS), peak, kurtosis, crest factor, impulse factor,
shape factor, and clearance factor [6, 7]. The frequency domain
features, such as energy in a frequency range, the matched
filter root mean square and the RMS of the spectral difference
could indicate an exact cause when it exists. These features are
often functioning well under steady operating conditions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank IDEA Cellular Ltd to have
made possible the access to the data used for this study.
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442

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GSM NetworkTelekomunikacijie,Vol 47,2002.
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flaw signals WSEAS Trans. On
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Figure 4. TCH call drop handling flow in live network

Figure 5. Root cause detection of TCH call drops

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TCH/F drop call number

40
35
30
25
Series1

20
15
10
5
0
1

70

139 208 277 346 415 484 553 622 691 760 829 898 967 1036
Time with 15 min granularity

Figure 6.

HDLC Communication between CMB and FUC broken

TCH/F drop in numbers

14
12
10
8

Series1

6
4
2
0
1

70

139 208 277 346 415 484 553 622 691 760 829 898 967 1036
Time with 15 min granularity

Figure 7. HW link Broken

TCH drop in numbers

35
30
25
20

Series1

15
10
5
0
1

50 99 148 197 246 295 344 393 442 491 540 589 638 687 736 785 834 883 932
Time wiith granulaity of 15 min

Figure 8. Abis control link broken alarm

Figure 9. PA Forward Power (3 db) alarm

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