Improving restorability in radio access network

Abstract

In the past, wireless network reliability issues have received limited attention. Previously proposed solutions have focused on protection against base station failures, which may require significantly more base stations than necessary. Actual data from wireless carriers suggest that problems in the backhaul are the uttermost reliability problems faced, and is therefore the main focus of this work. Current radio access networks are based on tree and star-like topologies, which have no inherent restorability properties. We propose a heuristic topology enhancement method that adds redundant spans and upgrades existing infrastructure cost-effectively, in order to create partially meshed architectures that could provide the desired level of restorability against single span failure scenarios. Both span and path restoration techniques are explored. The algorithm was tested using several different variants of restoration mechanisms. Results show that the proposed heuristic algorithm is able to achieve reasonably good solutions in a time scale that is several orders of magnitude faster than an optimization approach based on binary integer programming formulation.