Introducing an Unsupervised Automated Solution for Root Cause Diagnosis in Mobile Networks

Abstract

Today's network operators strive to create self-healing cellular networks that have a fully automated troubleshooting management process. To this end, the network monitoring system should be capable of detecting issues, diagnosing them, and triggering the adequate recovery action. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised solution to diagnose the root causes of network issues. As monitoring systems collect a large number of logs from the different devices in their networks, it is possible to determine which connections resulted in a poor user experience and apply a failed/successful label. Our solution, Automatic Root Cause Diagnosis (ARCD), analyzes labeled connection logs to identify the major contributors to the network inefficiency (e.g., a faulty core device) as well as the incompatibilities between different elements (e.g., make and model of a phone not being able to access a service). We evaluate the effectiveness of our solution by using logs from three different real cellular networks. In each case, ARCD was able to identify the major contributors and the most widespread incompatibilities. In the three cases, the precision (detection accuracy) and the recall (detection rate) are higher than 90%.