2.

0 Automation of Cellular Network Faults

2.1 Introduction
The internet explosion and increasing number of services on offer and subscribers has placed a lot of pressure on cellular network service providers. Cellular network subscribers have different requirements and needs. This requires that the operation of the network be optimal at all times, to attract and retain subscribers. This can happen with proper operation and maintenance of the network itself. The automation of cellular network faults, where these faults are reported before they occur is the approach for avoiding the catastrophic failures that may cause network blackout.

2.2 Cellular network faults

2.2a Definition
Cellular network fault can be defined as an abnormal operation or defect at the component, equipment, or sub-system level, which significantly degrades performance of an active entity in the network or disrupts communication. All errors are not faults as protocols can mostly handle them. Generally faults may be indicated by an abnormally high error rate. A fault can be defined as an inability of an item to perform a required function (a set of processes defined for purpose of achieving a specified objective), excluding that inability due to preventive maintenance, lack of external resources, or planned actions .

2.3 Causes of cellular network faults

The main causes of network faults differ from network to network. Managing complex hardware and software systems has always been a difficult task. The Internet and the proliferation of web-based services have increased the importance of this task, while aggravating the problem (faults) in at least four ways .

1. The speed of software development and release means less reliable and more frequently updated software. 2. Multi-tier and distributed software architectures increase the complexity of the cellular network environment and obscure causes of both functional and performance problems. 3. Internet style service construction implies more dynamic dependencies among the distributed software elements of the overall services making it difficult to construct and maintain accurate system models. 4. Internet scale deployments increase the number of service elements under a particular administrator's responsibility. 5. Many heterogeneous networks . 6. New innovations means interoperation of different networks must be kept to some level leading to faults. 7. Overloading of power supply gadgets, natural disasters, etc.

3.0 Implementation
3.1 Optimizationing the Cellular Network using Alarm SMS Tool:
Current method of alarm escalation using ALV Tool involves manual intervention .At present Site engineers getting the information about site alarms with a delay of 25mins(approximately) . Alarm SMS Tool is designed to improve the alarm escalation method by automating the process in fetching BSC alarms, data processing and sending the alarm information to concerned site engineer through SMS. It reduces the delay to 7 mins. BSC Alarm Report which includes site down information along with the previous alarms reported at the site will be provided to WFM team every 5 minutes.

3.2 Comparison
ALARM SMS & ALV TOOL COMPARISON ALARM SMS TOOL 1. Both Power alarms and site down alarms will be captured using ALARM SMS TOOL 2. Power and site down Alarms will be captured after every 5 minutes. 3. Site down alarms along with previous alarms reported at the site will be sent to Site Engineer by SMS with a delay of 6 mins. ALV TOOL 1. Only Site down alarms will be captured using ALV TOOL 2. Site Down Alarms will be captured after every 3 mins. 3. WFM Engineer will inform to Site Engineer by phone about the site down alarms reported at sites. 4. Delay in providing the previous alarms data reported at the site is

approx. 25 mins.

4. During OSS maintenance activities, Alarm SMS Tool will not be affected. 5. Alarms Backup is available in the system about 15 days

5. During OSS maintenance activities,ALV TOOL will be affected. 6. No backup is available

Figure 1:Alarm Automation tool This Alarm Automation tool give information about Site Name(site id),BSC Name,Date,time and the type of alarm.

3.3ADVANTAGES OF ALARM SMS TOOL

Reducing the manual errors during escalation of BSC Alarms and improves productivity of Alarm Monitoring BSC Site outage time will be reduced by minimizing the delay in alarm escalation time. Site Alarm Log files are available for 30 days in the server for reconcilation. It avoids the interruption in tracking of BSC alarms during OSS Maintenance activities and OSS LAN Outages.

3.4 Automation Procedure

Figure 2: Architecture of Alarm Automation

In this automation process SMSC plays an important role of sending the alarm information to concerned site engineer through SMS. The SMSC is software that resides in the operators network and manages the processes including queuing the messages, billing the sender and returning receipts if necessary. Any fault in the BSS will be figured out and routing has to done to a particular site engineer through the MSC by the SMSC.

4.0 FUTURE WORK

As per now Alarm Automation tool displays the information about the some specific faults in the base station like OML,SYNC fault etc , Bharathi Airtel is expecting our team to define more parameters that will be helpful for that site engineers. If Abis is OK and OML down that means BTS still works with the configuration it has in that moment and will carry traffic. But, it's not possible to control BTS from OMC-R (do any changes etc.), you can't know what it happens with BTS, is it really working or not. Somebody should go to the site and reset BTS. New parameters that we are going to define in the upcoming months will be 1. MAINS FAILURE. 2. DOOR OPEN SITE ON BATTERY. 3. LOW BATTERY VOLTAGE. 4. LOW BATTERY. 5. HIGH TEMPERATURE. 6. RECTIFIER FAIL. Etc.

5.0 Bibliography
Web site URLs: 1.http://wireless.per.nl/reference/chaptr01/telephon/gsm/gsmnetwm.html 2.www.gsmfordummies.com/architecture/arch.shtml 3.http://www.scribd.com/doc/13938693/GSM-RF-Optimization

Research Papers:

1.Automation of Cellular Network Faults Okuthe P. Kogeda and Johnson I. Agbinya1 2. Radio Frequency Optimization & QoS Evaluation in Operational GSM Network Bilal Haider, M. Zafrullah and M. K. Islam

Books: 1.Ericsson WCDMA System Overview