SON measure of Sucess

[raj.marylandcp]

Hello,

I appreciate your time and knowledge. I work for an operator, have some background in LTE RF optimization and starting to learn more about SON and have a question regarding the same.

Question:

With SON there are specific features ( for example: ANR ) and as per my understanding a measure of success for any feature will be improvement in the final KPI's ( w.r.t. to ANR -- Handoff success improvement % or an audit indicating reduction in missing neighbors above a certain %).

But how do you know if the feature is activated and the improvement in KPI is due to that particular feature as one feature of SON contributes to multiple KPI's ?

I will answer my first question: how do you know if the feature is activated --- A mass audit indicating that the feature is ON/OFF. Any suggestions on any other ways ?

Thanks,
Raj

[Vladislav]

Hello,

I appreciate your time and knowledge. I work for an operator, have some background in LTE RF optimization and starting to learn more about SON and have a question regarding the same.

Question:

With SON there are specific features ( for example: ANR ) and as per my understanding a measure of success for any feature will be improvement in the final KPI's ( w.r.t. to ANR -- Handoff success improvement % or an audit indicating reduction in missing neighbors above a certain %).

But how do you know if the feature is activated and the improvement in KPI is due to that particular feature as one feature of SON contributes to multiple KPI's ?

I will answer my first question: how do you know if the feature is activated --- A mass audit indicating that the feature is ON/OFF. Any suggestions on any other ways ?

Thanks,
Raj

Hi,
I worked only with one SON product and it made tracking of certain number of KPI during the optimization process. So when you are turning on closed-loop optimization function it starts to compare KPI. If it will detect degradation higher than threshold that last actions will be roll-backed.
Actually I cannot understand the reason of the question. Why can't you just compare necessary KPI values before and after SON feature activation? Of course there is no 100% guarantee that improvement happened due to feature activation, but it is most probable reason if nothing else was changed in the network and you saw the KPI improvement..
As for ANR I met it in LTE only, it not even called as a part of SON there. Anyway you can check the number of neighbors before and after ANR activatin and observe the difference. If neighbor list will be modified it means that ANR is working properly.
Could you please tell what SON product are you testing? And is it for WCDMA or LTE network?

[shahram]

Interesting subject, anyone can list the SON products available in market now, I can mentioned two of them: Intucell COPS-SON (from Celcite)

[TelcoConsultant]

Hello,

Raj, the short answer to your question is: you can not measure the success of SON unless you run all the element within SON.

It is not only a problem of SON, even conventional optimization effort can lead some side effects. I am not a RAN expert but I guess this example is not wrong: in order to increase coverage I increase pwr and tilt, I end up with an overshooter. (or vice versa.)

ANR is one of the safest areas in SON, but if we are gonna go deeper then things get serious. So, I believe SON needs human supervision and there is not a certain way to measure the success of SON alghoritms. You need to see overall performance of the network, or the cluster at least.

@Vladislav: With all my respect, some basic concept of SON is already introduced in 3G: HWI is doing HO to even non-nei cells for a long time. (I managed to discover this after seeing %120 HO Succ rate in one of the product I was architecturing, I had to explain this to customer. ) But as I mentioned above, ANR is quite safe to play with and that is why everyone is stepping in with this into the SON.

I am happy to discuss further if anyone interested...

Cheers...