Machine Learning-Driven Anomaly Detection for 5G O-RAN Performance Metrics

The ever-increasing reliance of critical services on network infrastructure coupled with the increased operational complexity of beyond-5G/6G networks necessitate the need for proactive and automated network fault management. The provision for open interfaces among different radio access network (RAN) elements and the integration of AI/ML into network architecture enabled by the Open RAN (O-RAN) specifications bring new possibilities for active network health monitoring and anomaly detection. In this paper we leverage these advantages and develop an anomaly detection framework that proactively detect the possible throughput drops for a UE and minimize the post-handover failures. We propose two actionable anomaly detection algorithms tailored for real-world deployment. The first algorithm identifies user equipment (UE) at risk of severe throughput degradation by analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) such as resource block utilization and signal quality metrics, enabling proactive handover initiation. The second algorithm evaluates neighbor cell radio coverage quality, filtering out cells with anomalous signal strength or interference levels. This reduces candidate targets for handover by 41.27% on average. Together, these methods mitigate post-handover failures and throughput drops while operating much faster than the near-real-time latency constraints. This paves the way for self-healing 6G networks.