Challenges in self organizing networks for wireless telecommunications

Telecommunication network systems continue to emerge to meet the demand in Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) especially for data access through Internet. The success of communication service providers (CSPs) rely on effective operational strategies to manage the network that includes planning, optimizing and maintenance of networks to meet the desired Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE) and business goals. The operational effort and system resources involved in managing the network effectively are increasing the CAPEX and OPEX for CSP. Network Management Systems (NMS) plays a crucial role in commissioning, optimizing, healing and maintaining the telecommunication networks for increasing the operational efficiency. BWA technologies have emerged with Evolved Packet System (EPS) that includes Long Term Evolution (LTE), System Architecture Evolution (SAE) and continue to emerge with “Advanced LTE” system as part of 3GPP standards. CSPs are slowly adapting BWA business model with the help of LTE, HSPA+ and WiMax systems. The existing wireless systems like GSM, UMTS and CDMA systems continue to co-exist with BWA systems. The challenges faced by CSPs in managing the networks continue to increase for the heterogeneous telecommunication network systems which include access network elements, core network elements and service delivery platforms. As part of 3GPP LTE standardization “Self Organizing Networks” (SON) emerged as a preliminary standard and continue to mature for addressing the network operational efficiency. In this paper, for effective network operations the key challenges and other Non functional challenges for realizing the SON use cases(as per 3GPP Release 9 and Release 10) are highlighted, though challenges and nonfunctional challenges are not exclusively mentioned as part of standardization document.