Cell Outage Compensation in LTE Networks: Algorithms and Performance Assessment

Cell outage compensation is a self-healing function and as such part of the Self-Organising Networks concept for mobile wireless networks. It aims at mitigating the degradation of coverage, capacity and service quality caused by a cell or site level outage. Upon detection of such an outage, cell outage compensation tunes a variety of control parameters, e.g., electrical antenna tilt and uplink target received power level, in cells surrounding the affected site, in order to minimise the outage-induced performance effects in accordance with the operator policy. In this paper we outline the cell outage management framework, propose concrete compensation algorithms and assess the achieved performance effects in various scenarios. The reported simulation results show that the proposed compensation algorithm is able to recover a significant percentage of the users that would otherwise be dropped, while still providing sufficient service quality in the compensating cells.