Effectiveness of cell outage compensation in LTE networks

Cell outage management is a self-healing functionality in future mobile cellular networks, aiming to automatically detect cell or site level outages (cell outage detection) as well as to mitigate as much as possible the caused degradation of coverage, capacity and/or service quality (cell outage compensation). Cell outage compensation has a variety of control parameters (and combination thereof) at its disposal in surrounding cells/sites, including the reference signal power P_RS, antenna tilt, scheduling parameters and the uplink target received power level P₀. By appropriately tuning these control parameters, the outage-induced performance effects can be minimised, in terms of some operator-specified balance of relevant performance metrics. This paper analyses the effectiveness of selected control parameters in mitigating the effects of cell/site outages, learning that the antenna tilt and P₀ are most effective in restoring coverage, while P₀ is most effective in restoring user throughput performance.