A scalable SON coordination framework for 5G

For the near future mobile network management is expected to be an intractable task. This is due to the coexistence of different radio access technologies, slice-specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, the combination of multiple conflicting goals in network functions, etc. In order to reduce the human interaction in that duty, Self-Organized Networks Functions (SF) are proposed to provide self-adaptation capabilities to mobile networks on different fronts: configuration, optimization and healing. Conventional design of these SFs was based on single objective optimization approaches where SFs were considered as standalone agents aiming at one very specific local objective. Therefore, inter-dependencies between SFs were somehow neglected, so when more than one function is acting on the network, conflicts are inevitable. A well-studied conflict happens when Mobility Load Balancing (MLB) and Mobility Robustness Optimization (MRO) functions are simultaneously set up: without coordination, performance degradation will happen because of the inter-dependencies between both SFs which rule the standard handover procedure. To cope with these underlying conflicts, we propose a new methodology to automatically derive the system’s model, considering the dynamic of the selected SFs, to assist the network optimization task and to equip the network with self-management faculties.