LTE's self-organizing network can help operators reduce costs

One of the primary challenges mobile operators have dealt with over the years is the need to drive down operating costs while striving to get the best performance possible out of their networks. It's a constant balancing act that can influence both an operator's profitability and competitiveness. The challenge will become even more important in the coming years as operators add LTE to their systems that already require management of at least two other radio-access systems--2G and 3G--and constant management of a steadily surging demand for mobile data.

In anticipation of these needs, LTE will introduce new self-organizing network (SON) features that are designed to offer that dual benefit of reducing operating costs while optimizing performance. SONs will do this by automating many of the manual processes used when deploying a network to reduce costs and help operators commercialize their new services faster. SONs will also automate many routine, repetitive tasks involved in day-to-day network operations and management.

SONs are "definitely important to operators that want to look at deploying an entirely new network with LTE. They want it to be as easy as possible," said Peter Jarich, research director at Current Analysis. "But it is complicated too, because there are layers upon layers of how you can think about it."

The term "self-organizing network" is actually generic and rather broadly defined. It can refer to various self-configuration, self-organization, and self-optimization mechanisms built into a network and can be found, to a certain extent, in today's wireless networks. It is best viewed not as a product or feature but as a process enabled by various software and equipment features that reside in various parts of a network and that will be introduced over time, Jarich advises.

At the outset, LTE's SON features will be applied in base stations, but they are not restricted to the radio-access network and will ultimately be more far-reaching.

Robert Syputa, a senior analyst and partner at Maravedis, says that SONs also anticipate the general evolution of wired and wireless broadband networks toward greater convergence and dependence on each other. Wireless SONs will be needed in this context, as well, to achieve the high bandwidth, low latency, and distributed content and services architecture essential in this environment.

"It's very exciting. It is a big area of competition and innovation and it's really the heart of what 4G is about," he said. "The heart of the world is software. It's what you do with the network, not the box itself" that matters.

For SONs to gain acceptance, however, operators will need to relinquish some of the manual procedures they've relied on traditionally. They'll need to trust these new features before they take that step.

Craig Connick, LTE product line manager and SON expert at Alcatel-Lucent, said that in the initial phases, operators will maintain a level of control while they learn to trust the new algorithms and features.

"They want the ability to turn them on and off, to be able to override some of the recommendations until they build confidence, and then they can switch the features on fully," he said.

The most near-term features will launch with LTE technologies based on Release 8 of the standard. These features will make it possible to build plug-and-play base stations that self-configure upon installation and automatically detect and relate to neighboring cells when activated. The plug-and-play feature will reduce the level of skill needed to install the equipment and substantially trimming the amount of time needed to set up a base station.

Beginning with Release 9, LTE will add more advanced optimization and performance management features. These will make it possible to dynamically adjust network operating parameters to maximize coverage and capacity, automatically adapt handoff parameters to minimize dropped calls, and balance the network load across LTE, 3G and 2G cells used in a system. Because the SON will log and report performance attributes throughout the network, it is also expected to significantly reduce the need for drive tests typically used to evaluate network performance.