SON for Government Spectrum Applications

Self Organizing Network (SON) is a new layer of cloud software intelligence that enables automatic and dynamic planning, management, optimization and fault-recovery of wireless networks. This increases the operational efficiency, reliability and performance of the networks. These key benefits have prompted the adoption of SON technology by both the operators (NGMN alliance) of wireless networks and wireless technology (3GPP) standardization groups. This paper presents an overview of SON technology and delineates several of its main use cases. It also describes how the concepts of network intelligence and policy control, inherent in SON, make it an ideal candidate technology to address spectrum sharing and other government spectrum applications.