Coordination of self-organizing network mechanisms: Framework and enablers

Future wireless access networks, e.g. LTE and LTE-Advanced, will be empowered by Self-Organizing Network (SON) mechanisms with the objective to increase performance, reduce the cost of operations, and simplify the network management. This article describes a management framework which enables the automatic, policy-driven coordination of SON control functions, and introduces future necessary evolutions that will allow to fully benefiting from the SON paradigm in operational networks. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering