Chapter 9
SON Operation
In traditional network management (e.g. cf. Laiho et al., 2006), network operation and optimisation are coordinated through interactions of the human network operators between themselves and with the system. The network operation personnel need to have a good overview over ongoing configuration, optimisation and troubleshooting processes within the network. This overview combined with their operational experience and their ability to assess the importance of a detected situation (and to trigger the required corresponding actions) allows avoiding the effects of negative interaction between management actions and thus to reach a stable operational state.
Additionally, network management has the requirement to be highly efficient. Detected failures shall obviously be handled with minimal delay. Moreover, the optimisation of the network has almost equal importance. In case management actions do not interact with each other they can be executed in parallel, while potentially conflicting actions have to be handled in a way that the conflict is either avoided (e.g. by serialisation), or does not have a negative impact on the system performance.
In the operation of a SON-enabled system, both challenges need to be addressed at the level of the automated SON function execution (rather than the human level), see Section 3.2 and (SOCRATES, 2008). In the previous chapters which have targeted the individual ...
