A measurement study of short-time cell outages in mobile cellular networks

We study the Short-Time Cell Outages (STCO) phenomena affecting Base Stations (BSs) in a mobile cellular operator network. The STCO is defined as a short-time outage of all or some BS cells (sectors) that lasts up to 30 min in a day, thus still guaranteeing more than 98% of operation. It is type of outage which cannot be detected directly through an operator network monitoring system. Although a complete characterization of STCOs has never been reported in the literature, such events are affecting the cellular network of every mobile operator. In particular, a statistical analysis of STCOs based on BSs measurements of a complete operator mobile network is performed. Our results show that: (i) STCOs impact everyday life of an operator network, (ii) high load of cells corresponds to an increase in the number of STCOs and their duration, (iii) the impact of STCOs to single sectors and whole BSs is not negligible, (iv) most of STCOs are recorded in urban areas compared to rural ones, (v) the impact of STCOs on users is higher in rural areas compared to urban ones, and (vi) the STCOs are correlated with the transferred traffic rather than the outside air temperature.