Federated Learning of Wireless Network Experience Anomalies Using Consumer Sentiment

In wireless networks, consumer experience is important for both short monitoring of the Quality of Experience (QoE) as well as long term customer retainment. Current 4G and 5G networks are not equipped to measure QoE in an automated way, and experience is still reported through traditional customer care and drive-testing. In recent years, large-scale social media analytics has enabled researchers to gather statistically significant data on consumer experience and correlate them to major events such as social celebrations or significant network outages. However, the translational pathway from languages to topic-specific emotions (e.g., sentiment) to detecting anomalies in QoE is challenging. This challenge lies in two issues: (1) the social experience data remains sparsely distributed across space, and (2) anomalies in experience jump across sub-topic spaces (e.g., from data rate to signal strength). Here, we solved these two challenges by examining the spectral space of experience across topics using federated learning (FL) to identify anomalies. This can inform telecom operators to pay attention to potential network demand or supply issues in real time using relatively sparse and distributed data. We use real social media data curated for our telecommunication projects across London and the United Kingdom to demonstrate our results. FL was able to achieve 74–92% QoE anomaly detection accuracy, with the benefit of 30–45% reduce data transfer and preserving privacy better than raw data transfer.