Key Technologies for SON in Next Generation Radio Access Networks

The aim of SON (Self-Organizing Network) is to realize the autonomic function of the wireless network by self-configuration, self-optimization and self-healing, which reduces the human intervention and improves the user experience. Self-configuration is a process where newly deployed eNodeB are configured by automatic installation procedures to get the necessary basic configuration for system operation. Self-optimization is a process that continuously monitors an environment and automatically optimizes various parameters when the environment changes. Self-healing is a process that detects and localizes failures, then fixes the problems automatically. This paper gives a comprehensive introduction to the SON functionalities and outlines the framework of self-configuration, self-optimization and self-healing. Some concrete algorithms are proposed for self-optimization and self-healing, which include capacity and coverage optimization and cell outage detection and compensation respectively. Simulation results in various scenarios are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms.