Business-aware son coordinator for LTE-A networks

Complex distributed applications such as those envisaged in 5G will be built as compositions of independent services. In order to deliver end to end business value to operators and other stakeholders, the services will require coordination. Among related existing self-organizing network (SON) solutions investigated, there is no formal way of linking SON coordination decisions to business goals. Every operator stakeholder who needs this information performs this task in an ad-hoc way and mostly perform network status verification after coordination in a custom way. In addition, the lack of traffic pattern analysis and forecasting methods in current solutions also limits the capability of operators to make proactive decisions based on actionable insights available in network data. Furthermore, due to the ever growing complexity of managing the continuously evolving mobile networks, it is becoming more and more challenging for operators to evaluate all potential coordination solutions given the huge number of available options. In this paper, we address these important limitations of existing SON function coordination solutions by implementing a business-aware SON coordinator. A business-aware SON coordinator is a coordination solution that implements a dynamic and unified way of harmonizing updates to coordination goals of various stakeholders without compromising network quality. Simulation results show that the proposed solution improves the quality of SON coordination decisions by 50% on average and provides a common truth to all stakeholders while guaranteeing collision and conflict free SON function coordination.

I. Introduction

In self-organizing networks (SON), operators deploy several SON functions (SFs) in order to meet business goals. Such networks usually require coordination of SFs in order to avoid confusion and to resolve conflicts among SFs. On the other hand, coordination decisions affect different stakeholders at operator business organizations. Currently, there is no formal link between different stakeholder goals and activities to SON coordination decisions. This lack of a common truth shared among all stakeholders can lead to work duplication, incorrect decisions and conclusions.