Abstract
Self-Organizing Networks (SONs) have an important role in the development of the next generation mobile networks by introducing automated schemes. Cell outage detection is one of the main functionalities in self-healing mechanism. Outage detection for small cells has not been discussed in literature with greater emphasis yet. The Femtocell Collaborative Outage Detection (FCOD) algorithm with built-in Sleeping Mode Recovery (SMR) is introduced in this paper. The proposed algorithm is mainly based on the femtocell collaborative detection with incorporated sniffer. It compares the current Femtocell Access Points FAPs’ Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) statistics with a benchmark data. An outage decision is autonomously taken by each FAP depending on a certain threshold value. Moreover, the FCOD algorithm is capable of differentiating between the outage and sleeping cells due to the presence of the built-in SMR technique.