Alarm Correlation in Mobile Telecommunications Networks based on k-means Cluster Analysis Method

Event correlation and root cause analysis play a fundamental role in the process of troubleshooting all technical faults and malfunctions. An in-depth, complicated multiprotocol analysis can be greatly supported or even replaced by a troubleshooting methodology based on data analysis approaches. The mobile telecommunications domain has been experiencing rapid development recently. Introduction of new technologies and services, as well as multivendor environment distributed across the same geographical area create a lot of challenges in network operation routines. Maintenance tasks have been recently becoming more and more complicated, time consuming and require big data analyses to be performed. Most network maintenance activities are completed manually by experts using raw network management information available in the network management system via multiple applications and direct database queries. With these circumstances considered, identification of network failures is a very difficult, if not an impossible task. This explains why effective yet simple tools and methods providing network operators with carefully selected, essential information are needed. Hence, in this paper efficient approximated alarm correlation algorithm based on the k-means cluster analysis method is proposed.