AI/ML Development for RAN Applications : Deep Learning in Log Event Prediction

Abstract: Since many log tracing application and diagnostic commands are now available on nodes at base station, event log can easily be collected, parsed and structured for network performance analysis. In order to improve In Service Performance of customer network, a sequential machine learning model can be trained, test, and deployed on each node to learn from the past events to predict future crashes or a failure. This thesis project focuses on the evaluation and analysis of the effectiveness of deep learning models in predicting log events. It explores the application of stacked long short-term memory(LSTM) based model in capturing temporal dependencies and patterns within log event data. In addition, it investigates the probability distribution of the next event from the logs and estimates event trigger time to predict the future node restart event. This thesis project aims to improve the node availability time in base station of Ericsson and contribute to further application in log event prediction using deep learning techniques. A framework with two main phases is utilized to analyze and predict the occurrence of restart events based on the sequence of events. In the first phase, we perform natural language processing(NLP) on the log content to obtain the log key, and then identify the sequence that will cause the restart event from the sequence node events. In the second phase, we analyze these sequence of events which resulted in restart, and predict how many minutes in the future the restart event will occur. Experiment results show that our framework achieves no less than 73% accuracy on restart prediction and more than 1.5 minutes lead time on restart. Moreover, our framework also performs well for non-restart events.