WHAT IS MOBILE TELECOM NETWORK FAULT MANAGEMENT AND WHY IS FAULT ANALYSIS IMPORTANT?

Definition

Network fault management is the process of detecting, isolating, and correcting network malfunctions and inconsistencies in a telecommunications network. The fault management function compensates for system, usage and environmental changes, and covers error and alarm maintenance, analysis, categorization, automation, and resolution.

Why is Fault Analysis Important?

A mobile telecom fault management system receives error detection notifications, tracing and identifying faults. Fault analysis carries out sequences of diagnostics root cause tests on this data, providing insights on possible corrective measures, reporting error conditions, and localizing and tracing faults by examining and manipulating database information generated from network-wide fault collection parameters.

TYPES OF MOBILE TELECOM NETWORK DATA AND ALARMS THAT ARE MONITORED WITH NETWORK FAULT MANAGEMENT

Mobile telecom fault management systems analyze and report five core network failure events and alarms:

  • Resource Failure Alarms (e.g., power outage, natural disaster)
  • Equipment Failure Alarms (e.g., mast misalignment, wire cuts)
  • Database Failure Alarms (e.g., issues with cloud and virtualized environments)
  • Software Failure Alarms (e.g., software updates, bugs)
  • Configuration Error Alarms (e.g., configuration inconsistencies)

USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) TO DETECT AND CORRECT FAULTS IN MOBILE TELECOM NETWORKS

Multi-Vendor, Multi-Technology Network Environments

Multi-vendor and multi-technology network environments significantly increase the chances of errors and inconsistencies, resulting in more alarms. AI can address these alarms quickly and efficiently and act upon or escalate the critical ones while automatically resolving repetitive alarms.

Rapidly Growing Networks

Rapidly growing networks due to IoT and machine-to-machine devices create dense networks prone to errors and inconsistencies. AI accurately and efficiently addresses a torrent of alarms at scale across heterogeneous networks while reducing MttR and guaranteeing network quality.

Increased Competition for Users

Quality of Experience (QoE) is an increasingly prominent KPI as MNOs battle it out with competitors for subscribers. Investing in AI technologies accelerates the isolation, identification, classification, and resolution of alarms, unlocking efficiency gains that empower MNOs to remain competitive.

Overcoming Network Expansion Constraints

Networks are snowballing, overstretching NOCs as the complexity of managing them increases. Onboarding new devices, nodes, and network functions using AI-powered integrated network fault management systems results in fewer errors and inconsistencies, significantly shortening MttR and supporting network quality.

INNSPECT: THE LEADING MOBILE TELECOM NETWORK FAULT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FROM ATS

INNSPECT is part of the integrated ATS Zero-touch Network Automation suite of products. The fault management system continuously monitors network-wide alarms, leveraging a correlation engine to provide root cause analysis and generate actionable reports. ATS INNSPECT’s core capabilities detect, isolate, notify, and correct faults encountered in the network, functions it achieves through an integrated modular architecture.

NETWORK PERFORMANCE AND FAULT MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES

ATS suggests important tips for CSPs Fault Management operations:

Understand your network. Deep knowledge of network elements and available data will make solution design more straightforward. Of course, ATS’s experts can help there too. Make sure that your fault management and monitoring system is 5G ready and future-proofed for 6G and related changes like O-RAN. Leave the complexity behind and look for seamless integration (e.g. out-of-the-box open interfaces and API integration) to reduce deployment costs and project time. Take automation to the core of your network monitoring and management operations reducing repetitive tasks. Assess and incorporate all data elements that provide real-time or near-real-time monitoring capability where feasible to reduce the impact of issues. Plan to ensure the extendibility of the system as your network evolves. Ensure that your fault management system provider is vendor-agnostic and Telco-centric. Consolidate alarms to meaningful and prioritized dashboard layouts to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of operations from a single platform across the network.

Collector

ATS Collectors gather alarms from different sources, mainly NMS systems. External data sources can be also integrated into the system via stream, file, or API methods.

Collection

Once an alarm is collected, it is written to the INNSPECT database. Also, if an external system needs to be triggered with specific input, it can be started here.w

Alarm Correlation

Depending on the type of alarm and alarm source, an additional post-process can be required. INNSPECT network fault monitoring solution supports:

Active Control: Checks if the same alarm is collected before and is still active. Duplicate Control: Checks if the same alarm was issued as an active alarm before, whether required notifications send or not, can be grouped with other alarms, etc. Threshold Control: Checks if the alarm trigger threshold (customizable) is passed or not; if passed an active alarm is raised. Count Control: Checks if the alarm is triggered multiple times (customizable) in a certain period (customizable), and if passed, an active alarm is raised. Clearance Control: Checks if the active alarms are still informed by source systems. If clearance is triggered, active alarms are closed automatically.

Notification

All changes start with the Alarm Correlation and trigger a notification action. So, when a new alarm is created, updated, cleared, automatically corrected, or cannot be corrected, a notification is triggered."