The present invention is generally related to systems and methods for measuring potential and/or actual customer impact resulting from problems in a telecommunication network.
Telecommunication network operators face a wide range of challenges to ensure continued relevance and profitability. Core revenues are threatened by over-the-top content (OTT) providers, with exploding data usage and heavily video-based network usage. Subscribers are constantly demanding more from services in terms of variety, capacity and commercial offerings. Telecommunication technology also continues to accelerate in complexity, leading to the need for new hardware investment. Subscriber base expansion in saturated markets is driven by innovation and superior customer experience.
Current state-of-the art telecommunication technologies such as the long-term evolution (LTE) wireless standard, converged heterogeneous networks, next-generation network (NGN) and network function virtualization (NFV) help reduce operational costs, but understanding customer experience in a competitive market can give a network operator a competitive advantage. Whatever the technology used by a network operator, customer satisfaction can depend on the ability to provide a desired level of service to a diverse and fragmenting customer base. From residential consumers to multinational corporations, customers want access to services wherever, whenever and at the best possible price.
Service uptime is directly linked to a network operator's revenue stream. If there is no service, there can be no chargeable events. However, quality of experience (QoE) can be equally relevant. QoE is linked to revenue, although in a less direct way. Degradation of QoE eventually leads to churn, and high QoE deterioration can discourage use of the service.
A system and method can be used identify issues within a telecommunication (telecom) network. Data is obtained from a number of sources including probes and network elements. One or more key performance indicators (KPIs) are identified for real-time streaming aggregation. Streaming data related to the identified one or more KPIs is aggregated in real-time, and an approximation of count-distinct subscribers and volume count is calculated, as well as an approximation of count-distinct subscribers aggregating by each identified KPI.
One or more drill objects found in the aggregated data are identified based on the calculations and real-time trending records are generated and stored for each of the identified one or more drill objects using an exponential moving average. Baseline averages are generated based on the real-time trending records. An increase in errors can then be detected based on the baseline averages and additionally aggregated real-time streaming data.
Deviations in each drill object contributing to the detected increase in errors are then analyzed and a full case report is generated based on details of the deviations. The full case report is displayed in a user interface and one or more alarms are propagated related to the deviations. The full case report is updated by checking subsequent values of the one or more KPIs until the increase in errors is no longer detected. Recurrence detection and automatic case correlation is then performed on data related to the one or more KPIs for which the full case report was generated and updated.
The following description is of the best modes presently contemplated for practicing various embodiments of the present invention. The description is not to be taken in a limiting sense but is made merely for the purpose of describing the general principles of the invention. The scope of the invention should be ascertained with reference to the claims. In the description of the invention that follows, like numerals or reference designators will be used to refer to like parts or elements throughout. In addition, the first digit of a reference number identifies the figure in which the part or element is first discussed.
In the following description, numerous specific details are set forth to provide a thorough description of the invention. However, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that the invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known features have not been described in detail so as not to obscure the invention.
The SAE architecture is a packet-based network architecture with separate control plane and user plane traffic. A user can connect to a network via a user equipment (UE) 102, such as a cell phone or other wireless device, by connecting to an element of the SAE architecture called an evolved node B (eNodeB) 110. An example of an eNodeB is a base transceiver station (BTS) in a GSM network. The eNodeB provides the packets received from the UE to the main component of the SAE architecture—the evolved packet core (EPC). A UE can also interact with a network via some other access point, such as a Wi-Fi access point 112.
The EPC includes several subcomponents some of which are shown in
The SGW routes and forwards user data packets, while also acting as the mobility anchor for the user plane during inter-eNodeB handovers and as the anchor for mobility between LTE and other 3GPP technologies.
A packet data network gateway (PGW) 123, 127 provides connectivity from the UE to external packet data networks (PDNs) 130, 132 by being the point of exit and entry of traffic for the UE. The PGW performs packet filtering for each user and charging support, and can act as an anchor for mobility between 3GPP and non-3GPP technologies.
Other subcomponents include a policy and charging rules function (PCRF) module 129 that supports service data flow detection, policy enforcement and flow-based charging, an evolved packet data gateway (ePDG) 128 that secures data transmission with a UE connected to the EPC over an untrusted non-3GPP access (e.g., the Wi-Fi access point), and an authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) module 126 for intelligently controlling access to computer resources, enforcing policies, auditing usage, and providing the information necessary to bill for services.
As will be appreciated, each of the modules and subcomponents of a network can be potential sources of faults and other performance issues. Service assurance for networks requires many tasks, including fault management, root cause analysis, performance monitoring and alarming, traffic trending and congestion control. These tasks aim to improve service availability and perceived quality in order to improve the customer experience of services delivered.
Data related to network performance can be extracted from various sources including network elements, such as described above in
Tools such as eoLive can be applied to detect network problems by identifying issues and classifying them. For example, such tools can classify issues as interconnection, congestion, logical or physical error, in order to pass them to the correct department and to provide an overall reduction of mean time to repair (MTTR), i.e., the time needed to fix a network issue that can cause a service outage or service degradation. Taking too long to resolve an issue can erode revenue coming from that service and, in the long term, increase customer dissatisfaction due to service unavailability.
However, the data that is currently being collected and accumulated is growing more quickly in volume than it can be analyzed. One of the biggest challenges for a telecommunication network operator today is making use of the huge amounts of data available to management, operations, marketing, engineering and customer care in order to understand QoE for subscribers. It can be difficult to identify issues within the large pool of available data in a short period of time.
Big data in telecommunication networks is characterized by the large volumes of data (often many billions of event records per day are generated) and the many varieties of that data (e.g., the different interfaces, network and application technologies that are monitored). Because the volume of data is so large—and due to the complexity of the content of the data—analysis has been difficult and costly, leading to a frustrating execution gap between what the network operator wants to achieve with the data, and the tools and technologies sitting between the network operator and that goal.
Previous attempts to develop systems to analyze collected data involved a complicated and cumbersome process of gathering source data, extracting the source data, enriching the extracted data, loading the enriched data into a database (i.e., extract, transform and load (ETL)) and then presenting this information in some form of reporting tool at the top layer. A specialist would use this set of tools to derive insights. This often leads to data warehouses being used for a very limited number of functions, and often serving a limited number of users in the organization, i.e. those users represented by a limited set of experts who understand and have access to the reporting tools at the top layer. Data is often left lying dormant, and opportunities for improved service, cost, and customer retention are thereby lost.
Embodiments of systems and methods in accordance with the present invention can be used to provide insights inside data streams to identify issues that affect customers and also to respond to threats and opportunities for service delivery. Such embodiments can take advantage of opportunities for improved service, cost and customer retention.
In accordance with embodiments, systems and methods in accordance with the present invention can apply a continuous process of extraction of information to maximize the investment in data sources to thereby improve subscriber QoE and network robustness. Such embodiments can be useful for network operators who need to analyze huge amount of data coming from their network. For example, operational executives can benefit from key insights that impact the performance of the network and subscriber experiences, tactical officers can benefit from the ability to identify issues and possible causes without specialist involvement, and financial executives can benefit from real time analysis—leveraging a streaming analytics technique that can provide results more quickly than previous techniques for analyzing data.
In accordance with an embodiment, a systems and method can apply devices and tools within an infrastructure and techniques for processing data obtained from such devices and tools that collectively will be referred to herein as subscribers impacted and root cause analysis (“SIRCA”). SIRCA can be used to obtain data, generate key process indicators (KPIs) and apply data science and machine learning investigation patterns to improve the identification and resolution of immediate and ongoing issues and faults.
A systems and method can apply SIRCA to provide real-time classification that aims to identify flare-ups of issues affecting subscribers, and attempts to identify commonality between these issues. SIRCA relies on real-time streaming aggregation of distinct subscribers affected by issues and provides alarms driven by self-learning thresholds by means of outlier detection. In addition to the data gathering infrastructure, SIRCA can provide an interface accessible to individuals within the organization of a network operator. In one embodiment, the interface can be a social network style user interface (UI) for example that can take advantage of user subscription and a wall on which posts, news feeds, comments, etc. can be displayed. SIRCA can provide root cause analysis with real-time trending, recurrence detection and cross-interface case correlation.
Referring again to
In accordance with an embodiment, data records are aggregated in real-time in memory by a scalable directed acyclic graph (DAG). The pipeline feedback, when needed, can be achieved by leveraging distributed synchronization and group services software (e.g. Apache ZooKeeper). Aggregation output (i.e., KPI data) is then analyzed at each time window closure.
Real time trending records are kept in memory for each drill object found in data records so that baseline averages are always known. If a relevant increase in errors is spotted, it is possible to analyze deviation of each single drill object that contributed to the increase. Real time trending is achieved by means of exponential moving average (EMA). By leveraging standard exponential weighted moving average (EWMA) outlier detection, a self-learning threshold analyzes the main error count for each KPI (Step 206).
If a current value is within an allowed range (i.e., there is no threshold violation (Step 208)), the base KPI data (i.e., the count-distinct number of subscribers experiencing the issue in this time frame) is forwarded to a KPI storage component for later use (Step 210). SIRCA uses the full time series for the UI and also for data science features, such as recurrence detection, auto-correlation and long-range trend analysis. The UI can display charts showing full time series of KPI values in a time range, including not only erroneous time range.
If instead the current value is identified as an outlier (i.e., is a threshold violation (Step 208)), a stateful case-report is open. The real-time analysis leverages the real time trending records kept in memory for each drill object to not only have an immediate picture of the most contributing ones, but moreover to assess their individual deviation that brought the outage (Step 212). Drill impact score is also calculated. Impact score is a scalar summary measure (e.g. in the range 0-5) of how much each drill dimension impacted in/to the specific issue. Impact score is calculated by means of weighted and trended rate of drill error deviation/overall error deviation, at the moment of the outage.
The full case report details can be forwarded to the backend and storage component to be stored and displayed in the main UI and propagated as alarms (if configured to do so) (Step 214). The aggregation analysis component then keeps checking subsequent values of KPI to keep stateful case report up to date. As long as outlier detection reports error, the case report is updated (Step 216). When outlier detection goes off, the case report is considered as closed, and information about closure is propagated again to backend for storage and UI (Step 218).
Recurrence detection and automatic case correlation are analysis tasks performed at case closure. Recurrence detection leverages the backend KPI and case-report storage to provide a user with information about the following questions: How many times did this kind of issue happen in the past 24 hours? Is this happening on a daily basis? Is this happening on a weekly basis?
Automatic case correlation can be applied to find correlated cases with a specific case by analyzing all available SIRCA cases during the same time interval as the main case and looking for common objects in the most relevant drills. Correlated case reports can be displayed in the UI in a dedicated chart or table to give a user an overview of correlated issues happened in concurrency in its system.
Failures per second (FPS) can also be reported and trended in the UI dedicated to case report analysis. The average number of failed attempts volume per subscriber is compared to previous values to assess if there is an increase or decrease in the number of error retries performed by active subscribers.
Embodiments of systems and method in accordance with the present invention look for negative event clouds—issues that are affecting a certain amount of users—and then tries to look for common ‘co-occurrence’ features in the source data. When a cluster of users where a problem is taking place is detected, embodiments attempt to automatically identify the common factors in the event. Such analysis can typically take an individual on the order of 15 minutes of slicing and dicing in a suitably powerful business intelligence tool. This type of analysis can be performed continuously on all data sources.
In accordance with an embodiment, the UI is a social network-like, mobile-ready web interface where each user has a private account used to login into the software. A user can customize the channels he or she is interested to receive posts and notifications from, for example, each SIRCA instance running on specific protocol or group of subscribers (e.g. VIP groups) belonging to a channel.
In accordance with an embodiment, a main window can display one or more of a news ticker on statistics about case-reports, monthly/weekly overview of case-reports over time, and a list of posts. A user can receive case-reports like posts in the web UI main window. Each post can be displayed as a summary text of a case-report, describing when and what happened, how many subscribers are/were affected and a mini-chart visually showing the time series highlighting the violation period.
Each post can be dismissed so that a user will receive no more notifications regarding the same case-report. Each post can be ‘starred’ so that other users can see who ‘starred’ a post. Each post can be commented on, with all users having access to read other users comment on a post. Further, a post-and-broadcast feature is available to not only add a comment, but also broadcast the post to all users, even if they are not subscribed to that channel.
In accordance with an embodiment, in the main window of the UI it is possible to view an overview of a SIRCA case.
Still further, it is possible to share a case-report by sending a web link to an email address. A user is also allowed to export a time series of impacted subscribers to a format for transferring the data for analysis, such as a comma separated values (CSV) file format. It is also possible to open an external data discovery tool (e.g. Tableau), to follow up with a slice-and-dice investigation of the issue.
In some embodiments, the present invention includes a computer program product which is a storage medium or computer readable medium (media) having instructions stored thereon/in which can be used to program a computer to perform any of the processes of the present invention. The storage medium can include, but is not limited to, any type of disk including floppy disks, optical discs, DVD, CD-ROMs, microdrive, and magneto-optical disks, ROMs, RAMs, EPROMs, EEPROMs, DRAMs, VRAMs, flash memory devices, magnetic or optical cards, nanosystems (including molecular memory ICs), or any type of media or device suitable for storing instructions and/or data.
The previous description of the preferred embodiments is provided to enable any person skilled in the art to make or use the embodiments of the present invention. While the invention has been particularly shown and described with reference to preferred embodiments thereof, it will be understood by those skilled in the art that various changes in form and details may be made therein without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention.
This application claims the benefit of priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 62/314,806, filed Mar. 29, 2016, and entitled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR MEASURING EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER IMPACT OF NETWORK PROBLEMS IN REAL-TIME USING STREAMING ANALYTICS”, by Carlo Medas, et al., which is incorporated herein by reference.
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