Sleeping Cell Detection for Resiliency Enhancements in 5G/B5G Mobile Edge-Cloud Computing Networks

The rapid increase of data traffic has brought great challenges to the maintenance and optimization of 5G and beyond, and some smart critical infrastructures, e.g., small base stations (SBSs) in cellular cells, are facing serious security and failure threats, causing resiliency degradation concerns. Among special smart critical infrastructure failures, the sleeping cell failure is hard to address since no alarm is generally triggered. Sleeping cells can remain undetected for a long time and can severely affect the quality of service/quality of experience to users. To enhance the resiliency of the SBSs in sleeping cells, we design a mobile edge-cloud computing system and propose a semi-supervised learning-based framework to dynamically detect the sleeping cells. Particularly, we consider two indicators, recovery proportion and recovery speed, to measure the resiliency of the SBSs. Moreover, in the proposed scheme, experts’ optimization experience and each period’s detection results can be utilized to iteratively improve the performance. Then we adopt a dataset from real-world networks for performance evaluation. Trace-driven evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing sleeping cell detection schemes, and can also reduce the communication and runtime costs and enhance the resiliency of the SBSs.