Estimating Pole Capacity From Radio Network Performance Statistics by Supervised Learning

Network dimensioning is a critical task for cellular operators to avoid degraded user experience and unnecessary upgrades of network resources with changing mobile traffic patterns. For this purpose, smart network planning tools require accurate cell and user capacity estimates. In these tools, throughput is often used as a capacity metric due to its close relationship with user satisfaction. In this work, a comprehensive analysis is carried out to compare different well-known Supervised Learning (SL) algorithms for estimating cell and user throughput in the DownLink in busy hours from radio measurements collected on a cell basis in the Operation Support System (OSS). The considered SL approaches include random forest, shallow multi-layer perceptron, support vector regression and k-nearest neighbors. Such algorithms are compared with classical multiple linear regression and deep learning approaches considered in previous works. All these algorithms are tested in two radio access technologies: High Speed DownLink Packet Access (HSDPA) and Long Term Evolution (LTE). To this end, two datasets with the most relevant performance indicators per technology are collected from live cellular networks. Results show that non-deep SL algorithms are the most appropriate option for applications with storage constraints, such as network planning tools, since they provide a higher accuracy with reduced datasets.