Tracking Traffic Peaks in Mobile Networks Using Statistics of Performance Metrics

In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness to tracking traffic peaks reflecting the presence of mass events or permanent traffic hotspots. This trend is driven by dominant themes for wireless evolution towards 5G networks such as the problematic of hotspot offloading solutions, the emergence of heterogeneous networks with small cells’ deployment and the development of green networks’ concept. Actually, tracking traffic peaks with a high accuracy is of great interest to know how the congested zones can be offloaded, where small cells should be deployed and how they could be managed for sleep mode concept or even controlled according to traffic mobility if they are moving. In this paper, we propose a method for tracking peaks of traffic using performance metrics extracted from the operation and maintenance database of the network. These metrics are the timing advance, the angle of arrival, the neighboring cell level, the cell load and two mean throughputs: arithmetic (AMT) and harmonic (HMT). The combined use of these performance metrics, projected over a coverage map, yields a promising traffic localization precision even with considering imperfections of coverage prediction and mobile equipment capabilities in handling measurements. The proposed solution can be easily implemented in the network at an appreciable low cost.