Using Big Data for Improving Dependability: A Cellular Network Tale

There are many large infrastructures that instrument everything from network performance metrics to user activities. However, the collected data are generally used for long-term planning instead of improving reliability and user experience in real time. In this paper, we present our vision of how such collections of data can be used in real time to enhance the dependability of cellular network services. We first discuss mitigation mechanisms that can be used to improve reliability, but incur a high cost which prohibit them to be used except in certain conditions. We present two case studies where analyses of real cellular network traffic data show that we can identify these conditions.