Time synchronization error detection in a radio access network

Abstract: Time synchronization is a process of ensuring all the time difference between the clocks of network components(like base stations, boundary clocks, grandmasters, etc.) in the mobile network is zero or negligible. It is one of the important factors responsible for ensuring effective communication between two user-equipments in a mobile network. Nevertheless, the presence of asymmetries can lead to faults, making the detection of these errors indispensable, especially in technologies demanding ultra-low latency, such as 5G technology. Developing methods to ensure time-synchronized mobile networks, would not only improve the network performance, and contribute towards cost-effective telecommunication infrastructure. A rulebased simulator to simulate the mobile network was built, using the rules provided by the domain experts, in order to generate more data for further studies. The possibility of using Reinforcement Learning to perform fault detection in the mobile network was explored. In addition to the simulator dataset, an unlabelled customer dataset, which consists of time error differences between the base stations, and additional features for each of its network components was provided. Classification algorithms to label the customer dataset were designed, and a comparative analysis of each of them has been presented. Mathematical algorithm and Graph Neural Network models were built to detect error, for both the simulator and customer dataset, for the faulty node detection task. The approach of using a Mathematical algorithm and Graph Neural Network architectures provided an accuracy of 95% for potential fault node detection. The feature importance of the additional features of the network components was analyzed using the best Graph Neural Network model which was used to train for the node classification task (to classify the base stations as faulty and non-faulty). Additionally, an attempt was made to predict the individual time error value for each of the links using Graph Neural Network, however, it failed potentially due to the presence of fewer features to train from.