Boosting Service Availability for Base Stations of Cellular Networks by Event-driven Battery Profiling

Abstract

The 3G/4G cellular networks as well as the emerging 5G have led to an explosive growth on mobile services across the global markets. Massive base stations have been deployed to satisfy the demands on service quality and coverage, and their quantity is only growing in the foreseeable future. Given the many more base stations deployed in remote rural areas, maintenance for high service availability becomes quite challenging. In particular, they can suffer from frequent power outages. After such disasters as hurricanes or snow storms, power recovery can often take several days or even weeks, during which a backup battery becomes the only power source. Although power outage is rare in metropolitan areas, backup batteries are still necessary for base stations as any service interruption there can cause unafforable losses. Given that the backup battery group installed on a base station is usually the only power source during power outages, the working condition of the battery group therefore has a critical impact on the service availability of a base station. In this paper, we conduct a systematical analysis on a real world dataset collected from the battery groups installed on the base stations of China Mobile Ltd co., and we propose an event-driven battery profiling approach to precisely extract the features that cause the working condition degradation of the battery group. We formulate the prediction models for both battery voltage and lifetime and propose a series of solutions to yield accurate outputs. By real world trace-driven evaluations, we demonstrate that our approach can boost the cellular network service availability with an improvement of up to 18.09%.