A Distributed Mechanism for Detecting Cell Data Inconsistencies in LTE Radio Access Networks

The evolution for the third generation (3G) wide area mobile networks (long term evolution LTE) is currently nearing completion in the third generation partnership program (3GPP). Fundamental changes to classical public mobile systems have been proposed. These architectural changes specify that the network architecture for the LTE radio access networks changes from the 3G hierarchical design towards a flat design. The new model greatly improves latency for data traffic setup, but also introduces challenges to the traditional telecom network management architecture that relies on a centralised model. Issues related to scalability and availability become critical, especially for management tasks that involve checks of properties over an entire (sub)network. This paper proposes a layered peer-to-peer architecture for the network management system of LTE radio access networks, and shows how the problem of checking the consistency of neighbouring cell relations for handover may be solved in a distributed manner. The algorithm was tested both on Ericsson's Mobile Switching Platform to demonstrate technical feasibility, and on a larger scale, on top of the Bamboo simulator, using real cell information provided by 3G operators that implemented the Ericsson solution. The experiments show that the distributed algorithm correctly checks the consistency of neighbouring cell relations with very high percentages of detecting inconsistencies in both static and dynamic networks of increasingly larger size.