The Use of Cell Zooming for Outage Compensation in Cellular Radio Networks

Abstract

The emerging treads in cellular communication are shifting from the manual operation and maintenance to more automated one as in the Self-Organizing Networks (SON) defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) release 8. The idea is to have an autonomous system that requires minimum human intervention. One of the areas of focus in the self-organizing networks (SON) is in outage compensation for self-healing. Cell outage is the total loss of radio services in the coverage area of a cell. Cell zooming has been adversely used in the area of
optimization and power saving but its applicability in outage compensation in the 2G and 3G setting has not been given the weight it deserves. Its behavior can however be exploited for cell outage compensation. This paper explores the technicality and practicability of the use of cell zooming in outage compensation. It considers the environment under which cell zooming can be applied and the various other considerations that should be taken into account in order to succeed in outage compensation using this method.