Self Organizing Networks and Enhancements

I have blogged about SON on two days before.

SON concepts are included in the LTE (E-UTRAN: is the air interface of 3GPP's long Term Evolution upgrade path for mobile networks.) standards starting from the first release of the technology and expand in scope with subsequent releases. A key goal of 3GPP standardization is the support of SON features in multi-vendor networks environments. 3GPP has defined a set of LTE SON use cases and associated SON functions.

The scope of the first release of SON includes the following 3GPP functions, covering different aspects of the eNodeB self-configuration use case:

1. Automatic Inventory
2. Automatic Software Download
3. Automatic Neighbor Relations
4. Automatic PCI Assignment

The next release of SON will provide SON functionality addressing more maturing networks to help decrease the CAPEX and OPEX. It includes the following additional use cases:

1. Coverage and Capacity Optimization: Coverage and Capacity Optimization techniques are currently under study in 3GPP and will provide continuous coverage and optimal capacity of the network. The performance of the network can be obtained via key measurement data and adjustments can then be made to improve the network performance. For instance, call drop rates will give an initial indication of the areas with the network that have insufficient coverage and traffic counters can be used to identify capacity problems. Based on these measurements , the network can optimize the performance by trading off capacity and coverage
2. Mobility Robustness Optimization: Mobility Robustness Optimization aims at reducing the number of hand over related radio link failures by optimally setting the hand over parameters. A secondary objective is to avoid the ping-pong effect or prolonged connection to a non-optimal cell.
   
3. RACH optimization: To improve the access to the system, RACH Optimization has been proposed to optimize the system parameters based upon monitoring the network conditions, such as RACH load and the uplink interference. The goal is to minimize the access delays for all the UEs in the system and the RACH load.
   
4. Load balancing optimization: Related to Mobility Robustness is Mobility load Balancing , which aims to optimize he cell reselection and handover parameters to deal with unequal traffic loads. The goal of the study is to achieve this while minimizing the number of handovers and redirections needed o achieve the load balancing.