Swapped Sectors Detection on Multi-Layer Networks

A common fault in mobile communications networks is the presence of swapped sectors. This is, coverage areas of two or more co-located sectors are swapped. The reason of swapped sectors existence is the interchange of feeders' connections from baseband units or radio units to antennas' ports. In particular, this problem has a greater impact on multi-layer networks, where a higher number of feeder connections are performed per site. In this letter, a method is presented to automatically detect swapped sectors using mobility statistics on multi-layer networks. Simulations have been carried out, proving that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the proposed method has been validated in three different real LTE networks.