Self-Organizing Networks (SON) is an important feature for network management automation
in the new generation of mobile communications. While SON have been considered
as part of the recent 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards such
as Long Term Evolution (LTE), it is expected that next 5th Generation (5G) mobile networks
present new challenges for SON solutions. One of the most important use cases
in Self-Healing is Cell Outage Compensation (COC). This paper proposes an important
improvement of COC function based on analyzing large real data sets from live networks in
order to adapt compensation to the real neighboring context. First, two methods (offline
and online) to classify outages depending on the degraded metrics in neighboring cells are
proposed and results for a set of cell outages occurred in a live LTE network are presented.
Second, a method for estimating the lost traffic due to cell outages is proposed in order
to quantify the load that cannot be intrinsically absorbed by neighboring cells. Finally, a
novel COC methodology is proposed by taking into account the results obtained in the two
previous studies.
