IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 57, NO.
4, JULY 2008
Automated Diagnosis for UMTS Networks Using
Bayesian Network Approach
Rana M. Khanafer, Beatriz Solana, Jordi Triola, Raquel Barco, Lars Moltsen,
Zwi Altman, Senior Member, IEEE, and Pedro Lázaro
Abstract—This paper presents an automated diagnosis in trou-
bleshooting (TS) for Universal Mobile Telecommunications Sys-
tem (UMTS) networks using a Bayesian network (BN) approach.
An automated diagnosis model is first described using the Naïve
Bayesian Classifier. To increase the performance of the diagnosis
model, the entropy minimization discretization (EMD) method
is incorporated into the model to select optimal segments for
the discretization of the input symptoms. In the first phase, the
diagnosis model is constructed using a dynamic simulator. The
simulator TS platform allows generation of a large amount of data
required to study the relations between faults and symptoms. In
the second phase, the diagnosis model is adapted to a real UMTS
network using counters and key performance indicators (KPIs)
recovered from an Operations and Maintenance Center (OMC).
Results for the automated diagnosis using both network simulator
and real UMTS network measurements illustrate the efficiency of
the proposed TS approach and its importance to mobile network
operators.
Index Terms—Automated diagnosis, Bayesian networks (BNs),
entropy minimization discretization (EMD), faults, symptoms,
troubleshooting (TS), Universal Mobile Telecommunications
System (UMTS) network.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE MOBILE telecommunication industry has experi-
enced significant changes in the recent past, and it will
continue to evolve in the foreseeable future. The current sce-
nario comprises a complex set of interrelated and rapidly
growing wireless networks, applications that require increasing
bandwidth, and users who demand high quality of service at
low cost but with a limited spectrum. In a few years, the highly
complex and heterogeneous Radio Access Network (RAN) will
comprise different technologies, such as the Global System
for Mobile Communications (GSM), the Universal Mobile
Telecommunications System (UMTS), and the Wireless Local
Manuscript received February 21, 2007; revised May 28, 2007, September
17, 2007, and October 3, 2007. The review of this paper was coordinated by
Prof. Y.-B. Lin.
R. M. Khanafer, J. Triola, and Z. Altman are with France Telecom
R&D, 92794 Issy les Moulineaux, France (e-mail: rana.khanafer@orange-
ftgroup.com; jordi.triolabosch@orange-ftgroup.com; zwi.altman@orange-
ftgroup.com).
B. Solana is with Telefónica I+D, 28043 Madrid, Spain (e-mail: solana@
tid.es).
R. Barco and P. Lázaro are with ETSI Telecomunicación, University of
Málaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain (e-mail: rbm@ic.uma.es; plazaro@ic.uma.es).
L. Moltsen was with Moltsen Intelligent Software, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark.
He is now with Wirtek, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark (e-mail: lars.moltsen@
Wirtek.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVT.2007.912610
0018-9545/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
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2451
Area Network (WLAN). As a result, the operation of the RAN
will be a tough challenge that the operators will have to tackle.
In addition, cellular network operators have to find ways to
reduce the cost of their services and improve their quality to
counter the threat posed by emerging technologies, such as
telephony based on the WLAN.
In a mature cellular network that has undergone most of its
site roll out, the major cost is associated with the operation
of the network. As the network consists of a high number
of pieces of equipment that are distributed across the entire
country, maintaining and operating this large and technically
complicated system is a difficult task that requires operator
personnel around the clock in several regional offices. Even
with reliable hardware and software, there are always faults
that have to be rectified as otherwise, the end user will either
experience suboptimal service levels or no service at all. As in
most countries, several operators are competing for subscribers,
and it is imperative to quickly rectify such occurrences because
otherwise, users will naturally switch to competing network op-
erators. Hence, fault management, also called troubleshooting
(TS), is a key aspect of the operation of a cellular system in
a competitive environment. As the RAN of cellular systems is
by far the biggest part of the network, most TS activities are
focused on this area.
TS comprises the following three tasks: 1) fault detection
(FD); 2) cause diagnosis (i.e., identification of the problems’
cause); and 3) solution deployment, namely fixing the problem.
Among the TS tasks, the diagnosis of the cause of faults is the
most complex and time-consuming one. A cause could be a
hardware failure (like a broken base-band card in a node B)
or a bad parameter value (i.e., transmission power, antenna tilt,
or a control parameter such as a Radio Resource Management
(RRM) parameter). The term symptom refers to indicators that
may help to identify the fault cause. There are two types of
symptoms, i.e., counters and/or key performance indicators
(KPI), and alarms.
The first steps in the automation of the TS process in cellular
networks have been focused on performance visualization [1]
and FD [2]–[5]. Regarding automatic diagnosis, very few ref-
erences can be found on the diagnosis in the RAN of cellular
networks. However, automatic diagnosis has been extensively
studied in other fields, such as diagnosis of diseases in medicine
[6], TS of printer failures [7], and diagnosis in the core of
communication networks [8]. However, diagnosis in the RAN
of cellular networks has some distinctive characteristics, such
as the continuous nature of performance indicators and the
existence of logical faults, such as a wrong configuration, that
 2452
are not related to a physical piece of equipment. This makes
the automatic diagnosis techniques used in other application
domains not directly applicable to cellular networks.
Research into the automation of diagnosis in the RAN
of cellular networks has been traditionally focused on alarm
correlation [9]. Alarm correlation consists of the conceptual
interpretation of multiple alarms so that new meanings are
assigned to the original alarms. It is a process that underlines
different tasks, e.g., reduction of multiple occurrences of an
alarm into a single alarm, inhibition of low-priority alarms in
the presence of higher priority alarms, substitution of a specific
set of correlated alarms by a new one, etc. Although alarm
correlation can be considered a first step in the diagnosis of
faults, it does not provide conclusive information to identify the
cause of problems, particularly if the possible causes are not
only faults in pieces of equipment. Other categories of faults,
such as interference or lack of coverage, are difficult to identify
if performance indicators are also not considered.
Some automatic diagnosis systems have also been pro-
posed for cellular networks, and they have been tested on
GSM/General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) networks. In [10],
an automatic diagnosis system for cellular networks was pro-
posed, which identified the fault cause based on the values of
performance indicators. The reasoning method, which used a
Naïve Bayesian Classifier [11], can be applied to diagnosis in
GSM/GPRS, third generation (3G), or multisystems networks.
In addition, a diagnosis model for GSM/GPRS RANs was also
described. In [12] and [13], Bayesian networks (BNs) [14]
were proposed as the reasoning method for automatic diagnosis
in cellular networks. In those papers, performance indicators
were modeled as discrete random variables, and the trials were
carried out in live GSM/GPRS networks. Expert systems built
according to this Bayesian approach have many advantages
when compared to other techniques used in other application
domains for diagnosis. For example, BNs efficiently model the
uncertainty inherent to human reasoning. In [12] and [13], the
parameters of the diagnosis model (probabilities and thresholds
for the discretization of performance indicators) were specified
by diagnosis experts.
The aim of this paper is to propose an automated fault
diagnosis system for UMTS networks. This paper provides a
complete view of the diagnosis process, from the mathematical
model to its implementation in a real UMTS network. To
apply automated diagnosis techniques developed for GSM to
UMTS RAN, the particularities of this technology have to be
taken into account. A UMTS network is an interference-limited
system in which users share the same frequency bandwidth.
Parameter modification or faults in one sector could impact on
the performance of neighboring sectors. A typical example is
the modification of macrodiversity (MD) hysteresis windows
(i.e., add and drop windows) in one station that results in the
creation or suppression of links in neighboring cells. Similarly,
alarms in a given station could be triggered due to parameter
modifications or faults occurring in a neighboring station. In
addition, in this paper, some methods to learn the parameters
of the model from data are proposed. Specifically, a method
to calculate the probabilities in the BN and two algorithms to
discretize the continuous symptoms are adopted.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 57, NO. 4, JULY 2008
Fig. 1. Example of the DAG of a BN.
This paper is organized as follows. First, in Section II, BNs
will be briefly introduced, and their application to diagnosis
modeling in cellular networks will be described. In Section III,
the adaptation of the BN model for UMTS fault diagnosis is
presented, taking into account the particularities of this RAN.
In this section, the results obtained when testing the diagnosis
model using a semidynamic simulator are also presented. In
Section IV, the results obtained when using the model in a live
UMTS network are described. Finally, conclusions and future
lines of work are outlined in Section V.
II. D IAGNOSIS S YSTEM B ASED ON BN S
A. Introduction to BNs
A BN [14] is a pair (D, P ) that allows efficient represen-
tation of a joint probability distribution over a set of random
variables U = {X1 , . . . , Xn }. D is a directed acyclic graph
(DAG) whose vertices correspond to the random variables
X1 , . . . , Xn and whose edges represent direct dependencies
between the variables. The second component P is a set of
conditional
probability functions,

for each variable, P =
one

{p(X1 | 1 ), . . . , p(Xn | n )}, where i is the parent set of
Xi in U . If D contains a link from
Xi to Xj , then Xi is a parent
of Xj , and thus, it belongs to j . Similarly, Xj is
a child of Xi .
For example, in Fig.


1, the
four parent sets are A = {C, D},
B = {D}, and C = D = ∅.
The set P defines a unique joint probability distribution over
U given by
  
n 

p(U ) = p(X1 , . . . , Xn ) = p Xi  . (1)
 i
i=1
Note that when the random variables Xi have a finite set
of states, the rightmost part of (1) is usually a much more
compact representation of p(U ) than the more straightforward
representation p(X1 , . . . , Xn ), which exponentially grows with
the number of random variables.
A BN can be used to infer p(Xj = x|E), representing the
probability of a variable Xj being in a certain state x, given the
available evidence E = (y1 , . . . , yk ), where yi is the observed
state of the variable Yi , and {Y1 , . . . , Yk } ⊂ {X1 , . . . , Xn }. In
the following sections, this shall be used to compute accurate
probabilities of fault causes given the observed “symptoms.”
B. Diagnosis System
Two components of the automatic diagnosis system have
been distinguished, i.e., the model and the inference method.
The diagnosis model represents the knowledge on how the
identification of fault causes is carried out. The elements of the
 KHANAFER et al.: AUTOMATED DIAGNOSIS FOR UMTS NETWORKS USING BAYESIAN NETWORK APPROACH
Fig. 2. NBM.
model are causes and symptoms. The inference method is the
algorithm that identifies the cause of the problems based on the
value of the symptoms.
Defining the diagnosis model comprises several phases. First,
the causes and symptoms for diagnosis in a UMTS network
have to be identified (see Section IV). Causes can be modeled
as discrete random variables with two states (absent/present).
We consider two types of symptoms, i.e., Alarms and KPIs.
Alarms can also be modeled as discrete random variables with
two states (off/on). KPIs can be modeled as discrete random
variables with two, three, or more states, each representing a
subset of the continuous range of the KPI.
The chosen BN structure is a so-called Naïve Bayes Model
(NBM), which is also known as a Simple Bayes Model or Naïve
Bayesian Classifier. The NBM (Fig. 2) consists of a parent node
C, whose states are the possible fault causes, and children nodes
S1 , . . . , SN , which represent the symptoms and may have any
discrete number of states.
It should be pointed out that since a random variable can
only be in one of its finite set of states, this model assumes
that there can only be one fault happening at the same time.
This is a simplification that is not always true in real life, but its
impact on the diagnosis performance is considered minor, and
the simplicity of this type of model is a clear benefit.
According to Section II-A, the required probabilities for this
model are the following:
— p(C = ck ) for each fault cause ck ;
— p(Si = si,j |C = ck ) for each state si,j of Si and each
fault cause ck .
Thus, with the NBM structure, the desired conditional prob-
abilities of the fault causes given the observed symptoms can
be calculated as


N where the used data set comes from. That is, the previous
p(C = ck ) p(Si = si,j |C = ck )
i=1
p(C = ck |E) = . (2)
p(E)
This equation assumes that the symptoms Si are independent
given the fault cause C. According to the independency proper-
ties of a BN, this is exactly what the NBM structure indicates.
C. Specifying KPI Thresholds
The different probabilities in the right-hand side of (2) are
calculated from data points corresponding to the analyzed cases
stored in a database (i.e., fault causes with the corresponding
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2453
symptoms). From the stored data, histograms are computed. To
derive closed-form (continuous) probability density functions
(pdfs), a very large database is required, which is seldom
available [10]. When the number of points is relatively small
(i.e., couple of tens of points for each symptom and fault cause),
probability tables lead to more accurate results of (2) than
approximated continuous pdfs. The derivation of probability
tables calls for discretization techniques in which thresholds
for the symptoms (i.e., counters and KPIs) are specified. When
mapping a continuous value to an interval, some information is
lost. Thresholds should be set so that the resulting states throw
away as little information as possible. This typically means that
the state provides information about the presence or absence
of a fault. As an example, a symptom could be defined for
the “Dropped Call Ratio.” One state for this symptom could
represent the “normal” situation, when no fault is present. This
could cover the range from 0% to 2%. The next state could
cover the “high” range from 2% to 10%, and finally, a third
state could cover the extreme or “very high” range from 10%
to 100%. Clearly, the two latter states somewhat indicate the
presence of a problem.
The threshold can be either defined by diagnosis experts
or learnt from training data. If enough data are available for
training, the latter leads to a more accurate model than the
former and, consequently, to a better performance of the diag-
nosis system. In this section, the methods used in the proposed
diagnosis system for UMTS are presented.
Two different discretization methods for specifying thresh-
olds have automatically been analyzed—an unsupervised
method [the percentile-based discretization (PBD)] and a su-
pervised one [the entropy minimization discretization (EMD)].
1) PBD: The PBD method is a very simple discretization
method where the user first specifies a percentage X. Then, the
X% percentile of the symptom values in a training set is the
state threshold.
The PBD method is appropriate when the data contains no
information about the presence of faults. For example, let us
assume that some user has a database with symptom values
for 1000 cells of a UMTS network. Then, for the “Dropped
Call Ratio” KPI with three states (“normal,” “high,” and “very
high”), the threshold between “normal” and “high” could be
calculated as the 90% percentile, and the threshold between
“high” and “very high” could be the 99% percentile. However,
when using this method, the user should always have in mind
example would work when the data are mainly composed of
well-performing cells. Nevertheless, if the data come from
the top 100 worst performing cells, then the aforementioned
percentiles would probably not make sense.
2) EMD: The EMD method presented here requires the data
used for learning to contain not only the symptom values but
also the observed fault causes.
In the machine learning literature, several discretization
methods have been proposed. This paper is focused on the EMD
method, which is based on entropy calculation. Entropy-based
discretization methods have been shown to be efficient with
advantages with respect to other techniques [15], thus justifying
their usage for diagnosis in cellular networks.
 2454 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 57, NO. 4, JULY 2008

The EMD method is a minimal entropy base heuristic that

was developed by Fayyad and Irani [16]. For each continuous-
valued attribute Si , the algorithm is defined as follows.
1) The cases of a training set D are first sorted by increasing
the value of the symptom Si . The midpoint mj between
the symptom values in each successive pair of cases in the
sorted sequence is considered as a potential threshold.
2) Each candidate threshold mj partitions the data set D into
two subsets D1 and D2 . The class entropy of the partition
is evaluated as described below.
3) The best threshold ti for Si is the candidate point that
minimizes the class entropy of the partition.
In [16], boundary cut points were defined, which are values
of mj between two cases with different causes in the sequence
of sorted cases. It was proven that the evaluation of only the
boundary cut points is sufficient to find the minimum class
entropy, which, in general, highly diminishes the number of Fig. 3. “Knowledge Builder” tool.
candidates to be evaluated.
Let |R| denote the number of cases in a subset R, and let
|R(ck )| be used for the number of cases in R with C = ck . The
class entropy of the subset R is defined as


K
|R(ck )| |R(ck )|
Ent(R) = − · log2 (3)
|R| |R|
k=1

where K is the number of causes.

Let mj be a boundary cut point of the set of D cases, which
partitions it into the subsets D1 and D2 . The class information
entropy of the partition induced by mj is the average of the
class entropies of the subsets

|D1 | |D2 |
Ent(D, mj , Si ) = · Ent(D1 ) + · Ent(D2 ) (4)
|D| |S|

where D1 is the subset of cases in D with values of Si lower

than mj , and D2 is the set of D cases excluding those in the
set D1 . Thus, a binary discretization for D is determined by
selecting the threshold ti for which Ent(D, mj , Si ) is minimal
among all the candidate cut points mj . This method can then be
recursively applied to both of the partitions induced by ti until
some stopping condition is achieved, thus creating multiple
intervals for the symptom Si .
D. Specifying Probabilities
The prior probabilities of the causes can be easily defined by
diagnosis experts, taking into account their experience on the
frequency of occurrence of each fault type. However, experts
find it much more difficult to elicit the conditional probabilities
of symptoms given the causes. Thus, those probabilities can
be learned from training data by means of Laplace’s law of
succession. That is
nki,j + 1
p(Si = si,j |C = ck ) =
N k + |Si |
where nki,j is the number of cases where the cause was ck and
the symptom Si was in state si,j , N k is the number of cases
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Fig. 4. Execution tool known as “TheCure.”
where the cause was ck , and |Si | is the number of states of the
symptom Si .
E. TS Toolset: TheCure
Within the Eureka Celtic Gandalf project [17], a toolset has
been developed that supports the methodology presented in the
previous sections. This toolset has been used to produce the
results documented in Sections III and IV.
The toolset consist of a “Knowledge Builder” tool that en-
ables the user to specify a model from expert knowledge and/or
from available learning data and an execution tool known as
“TheCure.”
Fig. 3 shows a screen dump of the “Knowledge Builder,”
where a number of fault causes are shown on the upper left part,
and a number of symptoms are shown on the lower left part.
Fig. 4 shows “TheCure” with five cells loaded. On the lower
(5)
right part, the evidence (i.e., observed KPI values) is shown
for the cell selected in the left panel. Above the evidence is
the actual diagnosis, that is, the computed probabilities of fault
causes given the evidence.
 KHANAFER et al.: AUTOMATED DIAGNOSIS FOR UMTS NETWORKS USING BAYESIAN NETWORK APPROACH
III. A UTOMATED D IAGNOSIS FOR UMTS RAN
U SING A N ETWORK S IMULATOR
The diagnosis model for a UMTS network requires to
determine appropriate causes and the available indicators
(symptoms) to efficiently infer causes of faults. Data from
the network are “expensive,” and to construct a significant
statistical database requires precious time from radio experts.
A dynamic network simulator allows to produce a large amount
of “cheap” data needed to adapt the BN diagnosis model
to the new technology. It allows determination of the data
requirements to construct an accurate diagnosis model, i.e.,
number of case studies, the symptoms associated to each cause,
etc. A simulator can be used to study only a subset of problems
that can occur in a real network: causes related to antenna and
system parameters (i.e., common channel power, maximum
base station (BS) transmitted power, neighboring list declara-
tion) and causes related to different RRM functionalities, such
as admission and congestion control or mobility. The simulator
used in this paper is a semidynamic simulator based on
correlated snapshots with time intervals on the order of 1 s [18].
A. Model Construction
Although one can benefit from the TS experience in GSM
[12], [13], the particularities of the UMTS technology should
be taken into account when developing the diagnosis model.
For example, UMTS is an interference-limited system in which
interference can produce coupling effects between neighboring
cells. Hence, a faulty cell can considerably reduce the perfor-
mance in a neighboring cell.
A reduced model has been built to prove the feasibility of the
techniques proposed in this paper. The causes and symptoms in
the model are the following ones.
1) Causes: Two types of fault causes are considered, i.e.,
hardware problems and bad parameter values, which result in
poor quality indicators and alarms. A parameter value could
be too big or too small (with respect to an optimal value) and
denoted, respectively, as Par+ and Par− . The faults considered
by the simulator are the following.
Channel element breakdown: This cause is a hardware
problem. One or several channel elements in a node B could
be out of service.
Pilot power: A too high Common Pilot Channel
(CPICH) power P ilot+ will extend too much the service zone
of the node B, thus becoming overloaded. Conversely, a pilot
power P ilot− that is too low will decrease the cell extent too
much, reduce its load, and push traffic to neighboring cells.
Antenna tilt: As in the pilot case, tilt+/− affects the cell
extent, its load, and that of its neighbors. An up-tilted antenna
will create interference in neighboring cells and will deteriorate
their performance, whereas down-tilted antennas will reduce
the cell range and may cause coverage holes.
Mobility parameters: Mobility parameters are of partic-
ular importance in mobile networks. The hysteresis events
1A and 1B, or add and drop windows, respectively, for soft
handover (HO), are considered here. Add window defines the
threshold for adding a new link to the active set of a mobile, and
the drop window defines the threshold for removing an existing
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2455
link. For simplicity of notation, the add and drop window
parameters with too high and too low values are denoted by
RRM_MD+ and RRM_MD− , respectively. It is supposed that
the difference between the add and drop windows is kept
constant as typically implemented in real networks. The add
and drop windows of a given cell have an impact on the creation
and suppression of links of its neighboring cells. In other words,
poor quality in one cell could be caused by a fault in another
cell. Hence, one needs to keep track of certain symptoms of a
BS and of its neighbors, making the TS problem more complex.
In a similar manner, one could consider other RRM parameters,
such as admission and congestion control parameters.
2) Symptoms: In the context of a simulator, alarms can be
defined using both counters and KPIs. When a KPI value ex-
ceeds a predetermined threshold, an alarm can be triggered. In a
real network, such an alarm would correspond to a “flag” raised
when processing data from the Operations and Maintenance
Center (OMC) or capture tool. The following symptoms are
considered.
— blocked call rate (BCR);
— dropped call rate (DCR);
— MD blocking rate. If a request to establish a new (addi-
tional) link with a BS is denied, it is considered as MD
blocking. The ratio between the number of MD blockings
and the total number of requests to establish additional
links defines the MD blocking rate. The MD blocking rate
of a BS is calculated here as the average blocking rate of
all the mobiles having this station as the best server;
— capacity/throughput. For real-time traffic, capacity is
given in terms of the number of mobiles per service. For
nonreal-time traffic, the downlink throughput is used as a
capacity indicator;
— Ping-pong. The ping-pong KPI is calculated as the fre-
quency of active set updates.
B. Case Study
This section illustrates the application of the BN model for
the automated diagnosis of UMTS networks using the semidy-
namic network simulator. Hence, data from the simulator are
used to adapt and fine tune the reference model and to assess
the amount of data necessary for accurate diagnosis.
1) Simulation Setup: The causes and symptoms used for
constructing the diagnosis model are listed below.
Causes:
— channel element breakdown in a BS (hardware fault);
— bad settings of system and RRM parameters: CPICH
power, antenna tilt, and mobility parameters (add and
drop windows).
In the construction of the Bayesian model, parameters that
are too high or too low are considered to be distinct fault causes.
In addition, a “normal” state has been included in the Cause
node, which stands for nonfaulty cells triggering an alarm.
Symptoms:
— BCR;
— DCR;
 2456
Fig. 5. One hundred ninety-six sector UMTS network for testing the auto-
mated diagnosis model. A buffer zone of 151 sectors is added to minimize
truncation effects.
— MD blocking rate;
— capacity;
— ping-pong indicator.
To improve the model accuracy and to take into account the
interference-related coupling effects between neighboring BSs
[19], the KPIs of neighboring cells (from the list above) have
also been included in the BN model.
A 66 trisectorial site network in a dense urban environment
is considered (with a total of 196 sectors, with two sites having
only two sectors). A buffer zone with 151 sectors is added to
minimize the truncation effects and is used in all the simulations
for network evaluation (see Fig. 5).
For each given cell and each selected KPI, a neighboring KPI
has also been calculated and computed as the result of averaging
the KPI values for that KPI related to the four neighbors
having the highest traffic flux with that cell. Each KPI (either
neighboring or serving cell) has been averaged over 3000 time
steps of 1 s in the simulator. The statistics for cells with faults
have been calculated as follows. Fifteen simulations for each
one of the seven faults have been carried out. In each one of
these simulations, one single fault was introduced into 14 of the
196 cells. Thus, 210 (= 14 cells/simulation · 15 simulations)
data points per fault have been stored in the data set. Finally,
210 nonfaulty cells (normal conditions) having triggered an
alarm along the 105 different simulations have also been added
in the whole data set.
In BN inference, the symptoms’ histograms for both normal
and faulty cells are of particular interest and are illustrated
below. Fig. 6 compares the BCR histograms for the normal and
faulty cells in the case of a pilot value (denoted as P ilot+ ) of
38 dBm that is too high (33 dBm is considered as a normal
value). A shift to the right of the P ilot+ histogram indicating
quality degradation can be clearly noticed in the figure.
The histogram for the MD blocking rate for the normal and
faulty cells in the case of a pilot value that is too high is depicted
in Fig. 7. As in the BCR case, the excess of pilot power results
in shifting the histogram to the right.
2) Diagnosis Performance Using Two Different Discretiza-
tion Methods: The discretization techniques and the per-
formance evaluation are currently considered. Two different
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 57, NO. 4, JULY 2008
Fig. 6. BCR histograms for (black) nonfaulty and (white) faulty cells due to
excess of pilot power.
Fig. 7. MD blocking call rate histograms for (black) nonfaulty and (white)
faulty cells due to excess of pilot power.
discretization methods have been analyzed, i.e., an unsuper-
vised method (the PBD) and a supervised one (the EMD).
The threefold cross-validation statistical test [20] has been se-
lected to compute the diagnosis accuracy of both discretization
techniques. Thus, the entire diagnosis workflow (discretization,
model probabilities estimation, and performance evaluation)
has been repeated three times using at each iteration different
couples of training and test sets. The final results are calculated
by averaging the performances from three iterations.
For comparison purposes, both discretization techniques use
a four-state segmentation of all the symptoms, having for each
KPI the states labeled “low,” “normal,” “high,” and “very
high.” Hence, for the EMD method, the algorithm described
in Section II-C has been recursively applied twice, whereas for
the PBD, the 70th, 80th, and 90th percentile of each symptom
distribution have been considered to find the three thresholds.
For both methods and for each iteration, a training set of
140 data points (cases) per fault has been used, namely two
thirds of the whole data set of 210 cases.
Once the discretization process has been performed, the
estimation of the BN parameters, i.e., the prior probabilities
and the conditional ones in (4), is carried out by means of the
method described in Section II-D.
Table I summarizes the discretization obtained for the BCR
symptom using both methods and their associated conditional
probabilities related to “normal” and P ilot+ faulty cells,
 KHANAFER et al.: AUTOMATED DIAGNOSIS FOR UMTS NETWORKS USING BAYESIAN NETWORK APPROACH
TABLE I
CONDITIONAL PROBABILITY TABLE FOR NORMAL AND FAULTY CELLS IN
THE C ASE OF E XCESS P ILOT P OWER P ROBLEM , i.e., P(BCR|“normal”)
AND P(BCR|P ilot+), R ESPECTIVELY , U SING (A) EMD AND (B) PBD
TABLE II
DIAGNOSIS ACCURACY COMPARISON USING PBD AND
EMD DISCRETIZATION TECHNIQUES
i.e., P (Si = si,j |“normal”) and P (Si = si,j |P ilot+ ), respec-
tively, where in this case, Si is the BCR symptom. This table is
derived from the histogram previously depicted in Fig. 6.
In the following step, the remaining 70 data points per fault
(i.e., one third of the whole data set) are introduced into the
Execution module to perform the diagnosis. The final diagnosis
is obtained using (2), where the different probabilities are
selected from the tables. The table entry is defined by the row
with the interval to which the symptom belongs. By computing
(2) for all possible causes, one obtains all the conditional
posterior probabilities for the all possible fault causes given the
set of symptoms and, in particular, the cause with the highest
probability to occur. Table II summarizes the obtained results,
where fault diagnosis and false alarm detection illustrate the
ability of the system to identify faulty and nonfaulty cells
(and not only to diagnose faults), respectively. One can see
how the discretization impacts the inference quality. The EMD
outperforms the PBD method in terms of diagnosis accuracy for
both fault diagnosis and false alarm detection.
3) Detailed Results Using the EMD Method: In this section,
the results using the EMD method are presented in more detail.
Figs. 8 and 9 show the entropy calculated using (4) as a function
of the boundary cut point for two symptoms [i.e., neighboring
ping-pong and downlink (DL) throughput] for each one of
the two iterations of the algorithm. The continuous gray line
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2457
Fig. 8. Entropy versus boundary cut points for the neighboring ping-pong
symptom.
Fig. 9. Entropy versus boundary cut points for the DL throughput symptom.
TABLE III
DIAGNOSIS RESULTS: THE UPPER PART CORRESPONDS TO THE
PERCENTAGE OF CORRECT DIAGNOSIS OF FAULTY CELLS , AND THE
LOWER PART CORRESPONDS TO THE CORRECT DETECTION
OF F AULTY T RIGGERED A LARMS
represents the entropy evolution as a function of the boundary
cut points for the first iteration, whereas the dotted black and
dashed gray lines represent the entropy evolution for the first
and second subsets of the second iteration of the algorithm,
respectively. The minimum value for each curve determines the
best threshold and is represented in the figures as a vertical line.
Table III gives the overall performance of the automated
diagnosis using the EMD technique with threefold cross-
validation test for the first two causes with the highest prob-
abilities. For each one of the threefold validation tests, 490
different faulty cells (70 points for each of the seven faults)
have been introduced into the Execution module as test set. On
average (computing the three different test sets), 344 among the
490 generated faults have been correctly diagnosed, namely the
highest probability has been attributed to the correct fault with
70.2% diagnosis accuracy. In 88 of the remaining 146 cases, the
 2458
probability given by the BN to the correct diagnosis has been
the second highest probability (i.e., in 88.2% of the cases, the
right fault has been the first or the second in the list of causes
ranked by probability).
Next, the ability of the system to identify nonfaulty cells (and
not only to diagnose faults) has been assessed. Together with
490 faulty cells, 70 different false alarm cells have been present
at each one of the three test sets. Among the different simu-
lations, on average, 34 out of the 70 nonfaulty cells triggering
alarms have been correctly identified as normal cells without
faults, and 16 of the remaining cells have been identified as
faulty but with a “normal” second diagnosed state (i.e., in
71.4% of the diagnosed cases have been identified as normal
in the first or the second cause ranked by probability).
4) Convergence: The number of cases required in the BN
learning phase (i.e., the number of data points for BSs trigger-
ing alarms due to faults and false alarms) is an important point.
A convergence study has shown that diagnosis results converge
from 85 data points. Hence, the assumption of using 140 data
points per fault in the training is correct.
IV. TS IN R EAL UMTS N ETWORKS
This section describes the application of automated TS in
a real UMTS network. First, the diagnosis model is derived
following the three steps below (see Section II-B):
1) identification of the fault’s causes and their associated
symptoms;
2) BN construction (structure and number of states);
3) model learning using expert knowledge and data ex-
tracted from an OMC (thresholds and probabilities).
Then, FD is performed using the learned model. It should
be pointed out that although certain parts of the model creation
are automatically performed, the roll of the radio expert and
the incorporation of the expert knowledge have proven to be
essential.
A. Model Creation
The starting point for generating the UMTS TS model is the
identification of appropriate symptoms (counters and KPIs) that
could help in the FD. Counters and KPIs recovered from the
OMC are the sole available information. Once the symptoms
are identified, the faults that directly or indirectly have an im-
pact on these counters are selected. Finally, the symptom–fault
relation is determined. The proposed model considers a cell to
be problematic if the DCR is high, namely higher than 1%.
The identified faults that can cause a high DCR are the
following.
— lack of coverage;
— uplink interference;
— lack of 3G neighbors;
— soft HO problem;
— 2G neighbors’ problem
• bad definition of 3G–2G neighbors;
• congestion in 2G neighboring cell;
• lack of 2G neighbors.
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— Other: The symptoms’ values included in the model are
expected to significantly change if one of the above faults
is causing problems. The last cause corresponds to the
rest of the faults that could originate a significant DCR,
such as the following:
• terminal problems;
• hardware and software problems;
• bad parameter definition.
If new causes are added, additional symptoms and alarms
may be needed to achieve a correct diagnosis. The symptoms
have been discretized according to thresholds learned using the
PBD method (when performing this part of the work the EMD
functionality was not yet available). For that purpose, a database
with more than 500 cases has been used.
The symptoms utilized for the diagnosis model are listed
below. It is noted that some of the drop call counters are
associated to specific causes.
— DCR for speech calls;
— DCR due to missing neighbor relation;
— DCR during soft HO execution;
— DCR due to lost of synchronization with node B;
— DCR due to a different cause (other);
— establishment fail rate for radio resource control
connections;
— establishment fail rate of radio access bearer connections
for speech calls;
— soft HO fails;
— average number of radio links per cell;
— relocation failures during 3G–2G HO;
— total number of inter-Radio Access Technology (RAT)
HO attempts;
— number of calls drop during inter-RAT HO;
— received signal strength indicator;
— failure to add the cell to the active set. This indicator is
calculated for the four neighboring cells with the highest
number of HOs.
B. Learning Cases
The model construction has required to manually perform
fault diagnosis of several cells where the correct diagnosis
was not previously available. From the diagnosis data, the
Knowledge Builder is able to train the model and calculate
thresholds and probabilities. The data used to build the model
comprises counters and KPIs recovered from the OMC with
a daily resolution. Several trials have been carried out (for
adjusting thresholds, determining relations between indica-
tors and causes, etc.) until the model convergence has been
achieved with 97% correct diagnoses for a learning set of
77 cases.
C. Fault Diagnosis
The last step consists of applying the diagnosis model to a
test set of problematic cells to evaluate its performance. Forty-
two faulty cells have been selected, and their corresponding
symptoms, namely counters and KPIs, have been introduced
into the Execution module. Among the 42 selected cells, six to
 KHANAFER et al.: AUTOMATED DIAGNOSIS FOR UMTS NETWORKS USING BAYESIAN NETWORK APPROACH
TABLE IV
DISTRIBUTION OF FAULTS FOR THE TESTING SET
THAT COMPRISES 42 CASES
TABLE V
DIAGNOSIS ACCURACY PER FAULT
TABLE VI
FIVE CASES FOR WHICH DIAGNOSIS IS WRONG FOR THE FIRST CAUSE
WITH THE HIGHEST PROBABILITY AND CORRECT FOR THE SECOND ONE
nine cases have been selected for each type of cause, depending
on how representative it is in the entire sample space, namely
in the real network. In 88.1% of the cases, the correct fault has
been diagnosed. In the remaining cases, i.e., in five of the cells,
the diagnosis has been wrong in the first option but correct
in the second one. Another important issue is that among the
37 cells correctly diagnosed, for 24 (i.e., for nearly 65%), the
right fault has been diagnosed with a probability higher than
90%. These encouraging results illustrate the effectiveness of
the BN approach of automated TS. More detailed results for
the diagnosis phase are presented and analyzed below. The
distribution of faults for the testing set is listed in Table IV.
The diagnosis accuracy per fault is depicted in Table V.
Table VI presents a closer look at the five cells (denoted
“CELL A” to “CELL E”) for which the diagnosis has been
wrong for the first diagnosed cause (and correct for the second).
The cases of wrong diagnosis in Table VI hint that the
main problems are related to the identification of 2G neigh-
bors and Coverage faults. Further effort should be invested by
verifying whether certain symptoms should be removed or if
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2459
additional ones could be added to improve the performance of
the model. Finally, in the present model, only 3G statistics have
been incorporated. The addition of certain counters and KPIs
from the neighboring 2G cells to the model such as load- or
interference-related symptoms could be a promising avenue to
further improving the diagnosis model.
V. C ONCLUSION
This paper has presented research on a UMTS-automated
TS carried out in the framework of the Eureka Celtic Gandalf
project. The BN approach has been selected and adapted mainly
based on previous work, and again, it has been found partic-
ularly effective for the automated diagnosis task. To further
enhance automation and performance of the BN model, the
automated learning of both KPI thresholds and model proba-
bilities has been thoroughly investigated.
The PBD and EMD methods have been used for threshold
setting. It has been shown that the EMD method achieves a
discretization of the input symptoms that is closer to optimal
than when using the PBD method, since the resulting model
shows better performance. In a first phase, the diagnosis model
has been studied on a semidynamic UMTS simulator. The
simulator allows the generation of a large amount of “cheap”
data required to learn the diagnosis model and to relate symp-
toms to faults. In a second phase, the automated TS model
has been adapted to a real UMTS network utilizing counters
and KPIs recovered from an OMC. In 88% of the considered
cases, the correct fault has been diagnosed, and in the remaining
cases, the diagnosis has been wrong in the first option but
correct in the second one. These encouraging results illustrate
the potential benefit of automated TS for a wireless network
operator. Finally, the methodology presented in this paper can
be extended to other RANs, including heterogeneous networks
and core networks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper was carried out in the framework of the Eureka
Celtic Gandalf project.
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[20] R. Kohavi, “A study of cross-validation and bootstrap for accuracy esti- Space Agency, Darmstadt, Germany. From 2000 to
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San Mateo, CA, 1995, pp. 1137–1143. Since the end of 1999, she has been with the
Communication Engineering Department, Univer-
sity of Málaga. Her research interests include satel-
lite and mobile communications, mainly focussing
self-regulation of radio networks.
Rana M. Khanafer received the B.Sc. degree in
telecommunication from Saint-Joseph University,
Beirut, Lebanon, in 1999, the M.Sc. degree in com-
puter science from the University of Paris 6, Paris,
France, in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree in com-
puter science from “Ecole Nationale Supérieure des
Télécommunications,” Paris Cedex 13, France,
in 2005.
She was an Assistant Professor from 2001 to 2004
and a Research Assistant from 2004 to 2005 with
the University of Paris 6. Since 2005, she has been
a Research Engineer with France Telecom R&D, Issy les Moulineaux, France,
and has participated in different projects on wireless network engineering, per-
formance evaluation, and design of traffic controls for multiservice networks.
Her research interests include mobile communications, quality evaluation, and
end-to-end QoS in multiservice networks. Lars Moltsen received the M.Sc. degree in computer
science and mathematics from Aalborg University,
Aalborg, Denmark, in 1996.
He is an experienced Entrepreneur, R&D Engi-
neer, and Software Architect, technically special-
Beatriz Solana received the Master Eng. degree izing in artificial intelligence (Bayesian networks)
in telecommunications engineering (radio commu- and mobile technology (3GPP standards, in partic-
nication area) from Madrid Polytechnic University, ular GSM, UMTS, and long-term evolution). From
Madrid, Spain, in 2000. 1996 to 2000, he was with Hugin Expert, Denmark,
Since March 2000, she has been with Telefónica developing software for Bayesian reasoning. From
I+D, Madrid, where she became an R&D Engineer 2000 to 2003, he was a Research Specialist with
with the Radio Communication Systems Group, tak- Nokia Networks, working on UMTS RRM algorithms, contributing to one
ing part in projects related to planning/optimization patent and a number of conference papers. From 2003 to 2007, he was the
tool development for 2G and 3G mobile radio sys- Managing Director of his own company i.e., Moltsen Intelligent Software,
tems. Likewise, she has collaborated in consultancy specializing in wireless communication software and automation of processes.
tasks and support radio planning activities with other The company grew and was sold in February 2007 to Wirtek, Aalborg, which
companies within the Telefónica Group. She has worked on European projects is a Danish/Romanian telecom software provider, where he is currently the
under the Celtic initiative. Business Unit Manager of the software services business unit.
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 KHANAFER et al.: AUTOMATED DIAGNOSIS FOR UMTS NETWORKS USING BAYESIAN NETWORK APPROACH 2461

Zwi Altman (SM’98) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. Pedro Lázaro received the M.Sc. degree in telecom-
degrees in electrical engineering from Technion— munication engineering from the University of
Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 1986 Málaga, Malaga, Spain, in 1997.
and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in elec- From 1997 to 1999, he was with the European
tronics from the Institut National Polytechnique de Space Agency, Darmstadt, Germany. From 1999 to
Toulouse, Toulouse, France, in 1994. 2001, he was with the International Telecommunica-
He was a Laureate of the Lavoisier scholarship tion Union, Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2001, he has
from the French Foreign Ministry in 1994, and from been with the Communication Engineering Depart-
1994 to 1996, he was a Post-Doctoral Research ment, University of Málaga. His research interests
Fellow with the University of Illinois at Urbana include satellite and mobile communications, mainly
Champaign. Since 1996, he has been with France focussing in self-regulation of radio networks.
Telecom R&D, Issy les Moulineaux, France, and has participated in different
projects on wireless network engineering. He was the Project Coordinator of
the Eureka Celtic Gandalf project that dealt with the automation of management
tasks in heterogeneous wireless networks. His research interests include mobile
communications, autonomic networking, and data mining.
Dr. Altman was on the winning team of the 2003 Innovation Prize of France
Telecom R&D and was the corecipient of the Wheeler Award for the Best
Application Paper of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society in 2005.

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