LTE-advanced self-organizing network conflicts and coordination algorithms

Abstract

Abstract-Self-Organising Network (SON) functions have been introduced in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-iven that network densification is emerging as the dominant capacity enhancement theme in both existing and future cellular networks, operational complexity and Operational Expenditures (OPEX) are bound to increase. Another, challenging feature of the future cellular landscape is that, more and more network nodes will be deployed impromptu.Consequently, Self-Organising Network (SON) functions are being considered as essential feature to ensure the technical as well LTE-Advanced Self-Organising Network Conflicts and Coordination Algorithms scale, the analysis of potential conflicts generated by the numerous autonomous functionalities in heterogeneous networks can be extremely challenging. Therefore, Self-Coordination among conflicting SON functions is essential in order to enable a stable network operation with tight operator control over the network behaviour. Self-Coordination among conflicting SON functions is thus understandably endorsed by the 3GPP System Architecture (SA) group (SA5) in 3GPP Release-11 [4].Despite its significance and implications, the problem of self-coordination has not been deeply investigated in literature. We highlight here the main contributions. The Socrates project team took the first step in this direction and organized selected interrelated parameters which could cause parametric conflict into basic groups [5]- [7]. Initial challenges on characteristics, parametric, and measurement conflicts when integrating SON functions into next generation wireless networks were then described in [8]. However, none of these works provide comprehensive identification, annotation and classification of SON function conflicts. Some Self-Coordination mechanisms for SON are described in [9]. However, [9] does not identify the application of these Self-Coordination mechanisms for specific SO function conflicts. In [10], for the first time authors have identified and categorised SON function conflicts, based on different criteria such as the network deployment, the Key Performance Indicators, the measurement and logical dependencies, the output parameters' direction/magnitude, etc. This is a very interesting first step towards self-coordination, however, the resolution of SON conflicts requires a deeper analysis, modeling and classification, as we will describe in the rest of the paper.Until now the state-of-the-art work on SON conflict classification has mainly focused on hard classification where each SON conflict is categorized into exactly one category while ignoring the fact that a SON conflict may arise due to more complicated interactions deriving from more than one conflicting conditions. In this case, it is not optimal to classify a conflict in a certain category, but it is better to work considering that any conflict may have a fuzzier classification, with different degrees of membership to various categories, depending upon the cause of the conflict. We will refer in this paper to t...

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