COMMUNITY DETECTION IN RADIO ACCESS NETWORKS WITH CONSTRAINTS

The present invention refers to a method and apparatus and computer program for detecting communities in a radio access network with a plurality of vertices (C, BBU), wherein the method comprises calculating (S11) relationship strengths (31, 41) for network connections between the vertices (C, BBU) by executing a connection strength calculation process by analyzing performance factors, decisive for network performance including cell coverage overlap, signal strength, and inter-cell interference. The method further creates (S12) a network graph with nodes, representing the vertices (C,BBU) in the network and edges, representing the network connections based on the calculated relationship strengths (31, 41) and applies (S13) an extended iterative disjoint community detection algorithm for clustering nodes into communities, wherein in each iteration imposed one or more constraints for clustering cooperating nodes into the same community are analyzed (S14).