2013 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC): NETWORKS
A Dynamic Afnity Propagation Clustering
Algorithm for Cell Outage Detection in
Self-Healing Networks
Yu Ma, Mugen Peng, Wenqian Xue and Xiaodong Ji
Key Laboratory of Universal Wireless Communication, Ministry of Education
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China
Email:myycandy@gmail.com
AbstractWith the rapid development of the mobile wireless
system, the operator is experiencing unprecedented challenges
on service maintenance and operational expenditure, which
drives the demand for realizing automation in current networks.
The cell outage detection is considered as an effective way
to automatically detect network fault. Our work presents an
automated cell outage detection mechanism in which a clustering
technique called Dynamic Afnity Propagation (DAP) clustering
algorithm is introduced. Performance metrics are collected from
the network during its regular operation and then fed into
the algorithm to produce optimal clusters for further anomaly
detection. The proposed mechanism has been implemented in the
LTE-Advanced simulation environment, through which we have
successfully detected the congured cell outages and located their
specic outage areas.
I. INTRODUCTION
The modern wireless communication system is becoming
increasingly complex with its requirement for high through-
put, seamless coverage and satisfying quality of service [1].
Maintaining the intricate network at a properly working state
by traditional approaches is rather time-wasting and energy-
consuming [2]. In order to overcome problems about capital
and operational expenditure reduction and to improve system
performance at the same time, the self-organizing networks
(SON), which owns the ability to congure, optimize, and heal
itself automatically, is introduced and promoted by the Third
Generation Partnership (3GPP) and Next Generation Mobile
Networks (NGMN) [3].
As the main component of SON, the self-healing technique
presents a promising beginning to automatically detect and
mitigate outages due to unexpected failures which could
signicantly affect customer satisfaction and system reliability.
The functionality is mainly comprised of two parts: cell outage
detection and cell outage compensation. An outage cell is
supposed to be in a situation where the UE cannot establish
and maintain all or only a limited set of the radio bearers [4].
There are multiple causes for a network fault, e.g., hardware
and software failures, external failures or even erroneous
conguration. Some outage cases can be detected easily by
operation, administration and maintenance (OAM) system,
while others require a long-term manual performance analysis
and often cause subscriber complaints [4]. The capability of
discovering potential failures in radio networks is particularly
978-1-4673-5939-9/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE 2266
important and useful for timely triggering the appropriate com-
pensation methods. According to the self-healing technique,
the cell with performance degradation can be brought back
into operation quickly.
Typical methods for detecting outage cells are usually
based on the deviation of an actual cell performance from
an automatically determined expected cell performance [5].
Research into the automated diagnosis of anomaly failures
has been previously studied via knowledge-based approaches.
A quantitative model in [6] was rstly built by combining
the knowledge of GSM experts and performance metrics
from a real network. An automated diagnosis model was
described in [7] with Bayesian network for UMTS networks.
In [8], a classier was constructed through a given training
set of patterns. These model-driven methods mentioned above
require prior real measurements and assumptions about outage
causes and symptoms. Also, the prole built by the faultless
behavior of network which will be a basis of comparison
to identify signicant deviations may not be applicable to
all situation. Alternatively, exploratory data-driven approaches
without prior respective proles are also used to detect network
outages. In [9], diffusion maps is used for dimensionality
reduction, a density function and K-means clustering are
employed for further distinction between normal and abnormal
data samples. However, the K of K-means clustering is not
easy to dene as the number of faulty cells to be classied
during anomaly detection stage is unpredicted beforehand.
To present a simple and fast solution, clustering methods,
especially an adaptive and dynamic clustering algorithm in
pursuit of optimal clusters, are now becoming widely used
for processing data points without any prior experimental
information.
In this paper, a Dynamic Afnity Propagation (DAP) clus-
tering algorithm is proposed to produce optimal clusters for
UEs performance metrics based upon a clustering quality
evaluation criterion Silhouette index, and the algorithm is then
employed to detect and locate the outage cells via UEs position
information. In section II, system model for outage detection
is briey discussed. Section III includes a detailed description
about DAP clustering algorithm. Further, based on a given
simulation scenario, the results of our proposed method are
provided in section IV. Finally, the paper is concluded in
section V.

II. SYSTEM MODEL
Modern mobile wireless communication system is managed
and maintained based on cellular networks which consists of
several cells each. Equipments with monitoring and measur-
ing capabilities like UEs, eNodeBs and OAM are activated
periodically to collect available measurements (related radio
parameters, counters, KPIs) and then feed them into the
analysis module such as OAM. In this way, the self-healing
functionality integrated into radio networks can be applied
to process these gathered measurements and automatically
analyze them to decide if there occurs any abnormal condition
in current monitoring period. When failure in networks is
detected through a proper cell outage detection algorithm, the
corresponding cell outage compensation action will be timely
triggered to minimize network performance degradation by
adjusting control parameters of neighboring cells.
A. Scenario Modeling
To simulate the actual mobile wireless communication sys-
tem, we consider that the monitoring area of cell outage detec-
tion in LTE-Advanced simulation environment is composed of
19 regular hexagonal cells with 3 sectors per cell. The scenario
is shown in Fig.1. To simplify the experimental analysis,
some necessary assumptions are made. Firstly, the whole
network is assumed to be divided into several monitoring
areas and each of them is comprised of cells with similar
performance, so that regular cells can be taken as references
for comparison with non-regular cells. In addition, the antenna
gain failure is utilized to indicate hardware breakdown and to
make difference between normal and outage cells. Different
antenna gain reductions are considered to represent different
outage degrees.
Fig. 1. Simulation scenario with two different kinds of anomaly cells in
cellular network.
As can be seen in Fig.1, the antenna gains of most cells are
set to be normal, so that users served by these eNodeBs can
get satised quality of service, and they are supposed to be
reference cells for distinction between good and bad samples.
While, the antenna gain of sector 0(1) is 50dBi lower than
the normal ones, as a result, most users cannot maintain radio
bearers and will experience serious quality deterioration. The
sector 4(1) reduces its antenna gain 100dBi that means the
serving eNodeB antenna has totally broken down and all the
2267
2
provided service is interrupted almost at the same time leading
to the worst outage problem. In other words, the two sectors
0(1) and 4(1) will be treated as problematic cells to be detected
during the simulation process.
B. Collected Measurements
Once a cell outage emerges in the monitored network, the
performance measurements collected at that moment will be
abnormal. Since UE can report measurements like RSRP and
RSRQ for each serving cell and its neighboring cells, we only
select some useful and available parameters to simplify the
data collecting and processing work. The performance metrics
are collected with event-triggered manner instead by periodical
triggering method to obtain less reference points for further
computational complexity decrease. The specic triggering
event we employ is A3 event, which corresponds to a situation,
when neighbor becomes amount of offset better than serving
cell.
When there is something wrong with a particular cell in the
radio networks, both the signal level received from the serving
cell and the inter-cell interference will be affected at the same
time. Then the values of Reference Signal Received Power
(RSRP) and Reference Signal Received Quality (RSRQ) which
could primely reect the system performance may experience
a signicant change upon certain network elements failures.
There are four measurements: serving RSRP, maximum neigh-
bor RSRP, serving RSRQ, maximum neighbor RSRQ being
used for input parameters of the proposed cell outage detection
algorithm. Moreover, position information is also gathered to
locate the specic outage cells when anomaly happens.
III. ALGORITHM DESCRIPTION
Let X = {x1 , x2 , , xN } be the set of perfor-
mance measurements reported by N UEs in A3-triggered
manner, where xi (i = 1, 2, , N ) is a four-dimensional
data vector containing key performance metrics which
is specically for representing a user. That is xi =
{RSRPis , RSRPin , RSRQsi , RSRQni }. At rst, the data set
are pre-processed to be normalized, and then be taken as
input parameters for cell outage detection algorithm described
in the following. The algorithm named Dynamic Afnity
Propagation (DAP) is proposed on the basis of a traditional
clustering technique called Afnity Propagation (AP) cluster-
ing algorithm.
AP is an innovative clustering method which considers
all data points as potential exemplars simultaneously. To get
a high-quality cluster, real-valued messages are iteratively
exchanged in a factor graph without pre-specifying clustering
numbers. It takes into a collection of similarities {s (i, k)}
between pairs of data points, where, here and hereafter, i and
k represent data xi and xk respectively. The self-similarities
pk = s (k, k) also referred to as input preferences are set to be
a common value where pk = p. Low preference value leads
to a small number of clusters, while high one could result in
a large number of clusters [10]. That is to say, the number of
clusters is directly inuenced by the preference value which is
generally hard to determine. To make original AP algorithm
 3

adaptive and dynamic, the modied method called Dynamic
Afnity Propagation (DAP) clustering algorithm is proposed
[11]. It could automatically produce optimal clusters through
a step-by-step search in preference space and a clustering
criterion for evaluating cluster qualities.
In order to produce high-quality clustering results without
increasing time complexity, it is necessary to bring forward an
effective adjustment mechanism. First, a reasonable searching
space [pmin ,pmax ] of preference p is gured out, where pmin
leads to clustering N data points into two clusters, while pmax

leads to clustering N data pints into N clusters which is
the suitable upper limit of optimal cluster numbers. Further,
there are two kinds of preference steps: pstep1 and pstep2
which contribute to the convergence and variational cluster
numbers respectively. More specically, pstep1 is a kind of
For a given cluster cK = {c1 , c2 , ..., ck } where cK denes
a clustering result in which there are K clusters and ci , i =
1, 2, , K refers to each of them. The Silhouette index,
which reects the compactness and separation of clusters,
is introduced to evaluate the clustering qualities [12]. The
Silhouette value of a data point i, Sil (i) is dened as follows:
b (i) a (i)
Sil (i) = , (7)
max {a (i) ,b (i)}
where a (i) denotes the average distance between data point
i to other data points within the cluster to which i belongs.
b (i) is the minimum value among all average distance from
data point i to data points in another cluster to which i doesnt
belongs. Then, the average of Sil (i) in cluster ci is computed:
1 
m

ne adjustment used for escaping numerical oscillations, while Sav (ci ) = Sil (i), (8)
m i=1
pstep2 belongs to a kind of coarse adjustment conducing to
gradually reduced clustering numbers. Similar to AP, DAP also where m means the number of data points in cluster ci . For all
takes the similarities between data points as input parameters Sav (ci ) values, the worst cluster in {c1 , c2 , , ck } is selected
in which the self-similarity p is initialized to pmax . Then the by the following formula:
traditional AP algorithm is executed. During the message-
Savmin (K) = min{Sav (ci )}. (9)
passing process, two kinds of competitive information called
responsibility r (i, k) and availability a (i, k) are iteratively K mentioned above to represent the clustering  numbers is
updated. They are computed as follows respectively [10]: actually a variable where K {2, 3, ..., N }. Based on
 
r(i, k) = s(i, k) max

{a(i, k  ) + s(i, k  )} . (1) repeated execution in DAP algorithm, N 1 clustering
k =k
results
  for all data points can be generated. Accordingly,
If i = k, N 1 values for Savmin (K) will be produced and they

 form a numerical set {Savmin (K)} from which the best
a(i, k) = min 0, r(k, k) + max {0, r(i , k)} , (2) clustering result for all data points is gured out. That is
  
i {i,k}
/
Sind = max {Savmin (K)} , K 2, 3, , N , (10)
Else, 
a(k, k) = max {0, r(i , k)}. (3) where Sind stands for the largest value that indicates the best
i =k optimal clustering quality. Finally, the corresponding optimal
cluster number is found as follows:
In the rst iteration, the availabilities are set to zero.
In addition, to avoid numerical oscillations, AP introduces
damping factor , (0,1). Then the two messages are
revised to times from the previous iteration plus (1) times
its prescribed updated value. They are updated below:
t t1 t
r(i, k) = r(i, k) + (1 ) r(i, k) ,
t
a(i, k) = a(i, k)
t1
+ (1 ) a(i, k) ,
t
where t denotes iteration times.
During afnity propagation, availabilities and responsibili-
ties can be combined to identify exemplars which are repre-
sentative for data points in a cluster. The exemplar for data i
is determined as follows:
exampi = arg max {a (i, k) + r (i, k)} ,
k 8: Produce optimal clustering result based on Silhouette
where exampi means the exemplar of the data point i.
When AP algorithm with pre-specied value p does not
meet the convergence condition, the preference will decrease
by step pstep1 : p=ppstep1 until it converges. Afterwards, the
value p declines by step pstep2 : p=ppstep2 in order to yield
falling clusters and terminated after two clusters are found out.
  
opti cluster = arg max{Savmin (K)}, K 2, 3, , N .
K
(11)
The basic procedure of DAP clustering algorithm is de-
scribed as below:
(4) Algorithm 1 Dynamic Afnity Propagation Algorithm
(5) 1: Input: s (i,k) , i = k.
2: Output: Optimal clustering result.
3: Compute the range of preference p: p in [pmin ,pmax ];
4: Initialize the preference p: p=pmax ;
5: Execute AP to generate K clusters;
6: If not converge, p=ppstep1 , return to index 5, until
converge;
7: p=ppstep2 , return to index 5, until p = pmin ;
(6)
index and the algorithm terminates.
If Sind is lower than a certain threshold (generally suggested
to be 0.5), that means both the compactness of inner-cluster
and the separation of inter-clusters are not so good, and there
will exist no much difference among the classied categories
2268
 4

TABLE I
SIMULATION CONFIGURATION PARAMETERS the quality indexes could be computed upon the dened for-
mula, and the largest one demonstrates the optimal clustering
Parameters Value quality. The dynamic variation of evaluation values related to
Cell type Macro cell different clustering numbers is presented in Fig.2.
Cellular layout 19 cells, each with 3 sectors
Inter site distance 500m 0.7

UE distribution Uniformly distributed

0.6
UE numbers 40 users per sector

The minimum of the Silhouette values

Path loss model P L [dB] = 128.1 + 37.6log10 R 0.5

Shadowing standard deviation 8dB 0.4

Regular antenna gain 14dBi

0.3
Non-regular cell 0(1) antenna gain 14dBi+(-50dBi)
Non-regular cell 4(1) antenna gain 14dBi+(-100dBi) 0.2

eNodeB max TX power 46dBm 0.1

Initial user access criterion Access by location

0
Trafc model Full buffer
Handover margin 0.5dB 0.1
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
The cluster number in DAP
Handover time to trigger 80ms

Fig. 2. The Silhouette index changes with different number of cluster.

which should be merged into one group [12]. In our work, Sind
can be applied to evaluate the probability for cell outage. The
smaller Sind is, the lower the probability would be.
In this paper, we adopt DAP algorithm to process per-
formance measurements collected from monitoring area de-
scribed in Section II and produce optimal clusters afterwards,
which are then used to locate outages based on user location
as shown in Section IV.
IV. SIMULATION AND RESULTS ANALYSIS
To simulate the actual wireless communication system, a
fully dynamic system simulation tool is employed in this
research. The simulation parameters are based on the 3GPP
specication [13-14]. Different faults which lead to emergence
of cell outages can be detected separately as we described
in section II. In our simulation work, different antenna gain
reductions are congured to represent different degree of
failures for cell outages as shown in Fig.1. In addition, the
parameter setting part about antenna gains is nished before
UEs accessing to a certain cell in the experiment. However, the
cell outages in real network may happen abruptly when users
It can be observed from the gure that the highest Silhouette
value happens when cluster number is three, which indicates
that the collected UEs performance measurements are charac-
terized as three different categories. The Silhouette value 0.62
larger than 0.5 (recommended threshold mentioned in section
III) means that there exist signicant differences among the
three categories, that is to say, poorly performed users exist
and outages have occurred. Also, the corresponding result for
optimal clustering depicted in a two-dimensional coordinate is
shown in Fig.3. From the point of serving RSRP, we can see
that the values of most data points (marked in khaki color)
in the right side of the gure are all larger than -100dBm.
While the average serving RSRP level of data in the middle
area of the gure is smaller than -130dBm, and the level of
data (marked in green color) in the left side is even smaller
than -160dBm indicating the worst faulty condition. From the
simulation scenario, it can be known easily that there are three
kinds of cells being congured. The clustering result is just in
accordance with the pre-specied conguration.






in their coverage area are still in connection with the potential 
faulty eNodeBs. To make sure that users can access the prob- 

lematic cells at the beginning of our simulation and later report

key performance indicators when A3 event is triggered, the
 
initial access approach is based on location information instead       
of power information. The detailed simulation parameters are 


listed in Table I above.
Fig. 3. Optimal clustering results for performance measurements based on
the DAP algorithm.
A. Optimal Clustering
As detailed in Section III, the pre-processed UE measure- B. Localization of Different Cell Outage
ments treated as data set are fed into the proposed DAP For localization of different cell outages in the nal stage of
algorithm for further detection of cell outages.
  The algorithm detection framework, UEs position information is applied. The
produces different clusters varied from N clusters to two clustered data points are all mapped into the network topology
clusters through searching in the preference space. According upon these location messages. The result is shown in Fig.4
to the general clustering quality evaluation Silhouette criterion, from which three distinct categories in Fig.3 are located in

2269

the actual geographic regions respectively. Khaki-marked user
data in hollow circles are distributed uniformly over the most
coverage area and only around the edge of the serving cells.
Since A3 event is only possible to be triggered by edge users
in cells which could provide satisfying service, so the Khaki-
marked data can be considered as normal and their serving
cells perform well. While the red-marked data in solid triangles
are only concentrated in sector 0(1) where the antenna gain has
dropped 50dBi and the sector 4(1) whose BS antenna gain has
a decrease of 100dBi is merely lled with green-marked data
in solid circles. The situation that users of sector 0(1) and 4(1)
are concentrated in the center and around the edge of coverage
area demonstrates that there occurs network breakdown and
measurements reported by them in these regions are abnormal.
The same conclusion can be made more visually in Fig.5
which is integrated by Fig.1 and Fig.4.
3000
User position Y
2500
2000
1500
1000 1500 2000
User position X
Fig. 4. Localization of anomaly based on UEs position information.
Fig. 5. A combination of the scenario model and localization map.
Detailed analysis according to the clustering result is con-
sistent with simulation conguration. For this reason, it can
be stated that, on the basis of the DAP detection approach
and UEs location information, the cell outage can be detected
successfully. Furthermore, it is important to note that the
anomaly caused by different hardware failures of sector 0(1)
and 4(1) is classied into two clusters because of different
degrees in interruption, which could be better for determining
5
an appropriate cell outage compensation method.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we present a cell outage detection mechanism
for discovering network failures automatically in future mobile
wireless system. On the basis of network measurements from
UEs, eNodeBs and OAM, the proposed approach named Dy-
namic Afnity Propagation algorithm has been implemented
successfully in LTE-Advanced simulation environment. In the
test, two different hardware failures represented by different
antenna gain reductions have been congured beforehand,
the gathered key performance metrics are then classied into
optimal clusters based on the detection algorithm. Finally, the
user position information is employed to map clustering results
into network topology through which we can make a clearly
decision that there are two outages during current monitoring
period and further locate the specic outage areas at the same
time. The proposed mechanism can be further extended to be
employed in heterogeneous networks for fault detection based
on collected key performance measurements.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported in part by the State Major Science
and Technology Special Projects (Grant No. 2011ZX03003-
002-01), the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(Grant No. 61222103), and the Beijing Natural Science Foun-
dation (Grant No. 4131003).
R EFERENCES
[1] M. Peng, and W. Wang, Technologies and standards for TD-SCDMA
2500 3000
evolutions to IMT-Advanced, IEEE Commun. Mag., vol.47, no.12, pp.
50-58, Dec. 2009.
[2] M. Peng, and W. Wang, An Adaptive Energy Saving Mechanism in the
Wireless Packet Access Network, IEEE WCNC 2008, Apr. 2008.
[3] M. M. S. Marwangi, N. Fisal, S. K. S. Yusof, etal. Challenges and
Practical Implementation of Self-Organizing Networks in LTE/LTE-
Advanced Systems, IEEE ICIM 2011, Nov. 2011.
[4] M. Amirijoo, L. Jorguseski, T. Kurner, etal. Cell Outage Management
in LTE Networks, IEEE ISWCS 2009, Sept. 2009.
[5] B. Cheung, S. Fishkin, G. Kumar, etal. Method of Monitoring Wireless
Network Performance, Patent US 2006/0063521 A1, Mar. 2006.
[6] R. Barco, V. Wille and L. Diez, System for Automated Diagnosis
in Cellular Network Based on Performance Indicators, Euro. Trans.
Telecomms., Vol. 16, Issue 5, pp. 399 - 409, Sept. 2005.
[7] R. Khanafer, B. Solana, J. Triola, etal. Automated Diagnosis for
UMTS Networks using Bayesian Network Approach, IEEE Trans. Veh.
Technol., Vol. 57, Issue 4, pp. 2451 - 2461, Jul. 2008.
[8] C. Mueller, M. Kaschub, C. Blankenhorn, etal. A Cell Outage Detec-
tion Algorithm Using Neighbor Cell List Reports, Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, Nov. 2008.
[9] Fedor Chernogorov, Jussi Turkka, Tapani Ristaniemi, etal. Detection
of Sleeping Cells in LTE Networks Using Diffusion Maps, IEEE VTC
2011, May 2011.
[10] B. J. Frey and D. Dueck, Clustering by Passing Messages between Data
Points, Science, Vol. 315, No. 5814, pp. 972-976, Feb. 2007.
[11] J. Zhang, X. Tuo, Z. Yuan, etal. Analysis of fMRI Data Using
an Integrated Principal Component Analysis and Supervised Afnity
Propagation Clustering Approach, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., Vol. 58,
No. 11, pp. 3184-3196, Nov. 2011.
[12] P. K. Velamuru, R. A. Renaut, H. Guo, etal. Robust clustering of
positron emission tomography data, Joint Interface CSNA, Jun. 2005.
[13] 3GPP TR 36.814 V9.0.0, Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-
UTRA); Further Advancements for E-UTRA Physical Layer Aspects,
Mar. 2010.
[14] 3GPP TR 36.839 V0.5.0, Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access
(E-UTRA); Mobility Enhancements in Heterogeneous Networks, Feb.
2012.
2270