A SON Decision-Making Framework for Intelligent Management in 5G Mobile Networks

The 5th Generation (5G) mobile system is envisioned to become more complicated and heterogeneous to meet the radical Key Performance Indicators specified in ITU-R IMT-2020. It imposes a great challenge on today's manual and semi-automated network management in 3G/4G systems. Taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Self-Organized Network (SON), the concept of intelligent network management provides an effective solution and therefore attracts the attention of 5G research community. In this paper, a SON decision-making framework is proposed to provide a possible method to realize intelligent management for the upcoming 5G networks. Two complementary decision-making approaches, namely Rule-based and Machine Learning-based intelligence, their interactions, and lifecycle management of intelligence slices are presented. Moreover, the setup of a wireless network test-bed, as well as some experimental results to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, are illustrated.