Operational Troubleshooting-Enabled Coordination in Self-Organizing Networks.

A Self-Organizing Network (SON) performs automated network management through the coordinated execution of autonomous functions, each aiming to achieve a specific objective like the optimization of a network Key Performance Indicator (KPI) value. However, there are situations in which a SON function cannot achieve its objective which can lead to disturbed SON operation and inferior performance. We present a SON Operational Troubleshooting (SONOT) SON function that is able to detect such problematic situations and trigger respective countermeasures. Thereby, it can exploit regular SON functions as probes in order to improve problem detection. Simulations show that the tight integration of the SONOT function with SON coordination provides means to automatically overcome the problems and improve overall network performance.