I Am Alive: 5G Communications Cell Outage Detection Using a Bit

Cellular networks have always been and will keep relying on the geographical network, brought about by the massive deployment of base stations/cells. In such a highly dense network, if a cell loses its connection with users and gateways, the quality of services committed by the network, degrades. Timely outage detection in a huge cellular network is a potential challenge. Moreover, 5G networks plan to increase the number of cells, with better coverage and reduced radius, which in turn escalates the problem further. Continuous audit of the liveliness of every cell has a high communication cost. In this letter, we propose to keep track of each cell’s liveliness using a single bit without the additional overhead of message exchange. Fortunately, already several message exchanges exist between every base station and the network. We propose to use the existing message exchange to piggyback liveliness update of each cell. Two variations of the proposed system are explored, i.e. centralized and distributed. Analytical and simulation models are developed to support the proposed scheme. The results validate that the proposed system can detect outages with 100% accuracy in any cellular network, without the minimal overhead.