Managing self-organizing radio access networks

Self-organizing networks (SON) have appeared as a promising solution for improving network management, performance and flexibility. SON capitalizes on self-x techniques and functions, namely self-planning, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, etc., in order to automate the traditional manual network operation and management processes and eventually to reduce the network operation cost and increase efficiency (higher quality-of-service/experience levels in a more cost-efficient manner). SON has received a lot of attention in recent years by researchers, academics and industrial players worldwide. SON features and functionalities are an integral part of the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) and are considered a vital feature of future radio access networks (RANs). LTE actually rendered SON as a key technology for assisting mobile operators to address challenges associated with the operation and management of their RAN. Despite its significant industrial footprint, SON is expected to continue as a hot research topic in the forthcoming years as it presents more and more challenges and for that reason further research as well as more industrial-oriented solutions are required so as to assist in the faster uptake of the technology. Thus the major goal of this special issue of the International Journal of Network Management is to present innovative approaches and solutions towards this direction. Accordingly, a total of eight submissions were received for this special issue, for which we wish to thank all authors. Each paper received at least three independent reviews from qualified colleagues in the international research community, with expertise in self-organizing, autonomic and radio access networking and management. Four papers were finally selected for publication. These papers present SON solutions in various use cases (mobility management, load balancing, coverage and capacity optimization); they span various domains (LTE, macro and femtocells and UMTS networks), and they were written by authors coming from academia, industry and research institutes. The first paper, ‘zCap: a zero configuration adaptive paging and mobility management mechanism’, by Per Kreuger et al., is based on the ascertainment that cell tracking areas for user mobile localization are manually configured today, hard to adapt to local mobility, and influence several resource usage and quality-of-service metrics. The authors propose a decentralized and self-adaptive approach to mobility management, based on a probabilistic model of local mobility. The second paper, ‘Self-organizing femtocell offloading at the flow level’, by Zwi Altman et al., presents a paradigm of applying SON in femtocell technology. In particular, it describes, models and validates a distributed, self-optimized offloading mechanism for improving capacity in a heterogeneous network with macrocells and femtocells.