Another new D-SON approach recently won the best enabling technology award at the Small Cell Forum in June 2013: that was eSON™ from AirHop.

AirHop’s eSON™ technology brings SON to the edge network elements for both 3G and 4G/LTE networks and can be viewed as ‘the PC revolution for RF networking’ since it offers both open component configuration and a client server approach for the following:

• Self-configuration to support distributed, real-time inter-cell coordination capabilities and allow neighboring base stations to communicate with each other so as to dynamically manage inter-cell interference, optimize frequency reuse, data throughput, and QoS during live operations.
• Direct inter-node communication and coordination to establish neighboring base station topology and inter-base station communications via a unified application-level software platform. [Note: This can address the need for co-ordination mentioned above.]
• Active real-time interference management based on coordination among the neighboring cells.
• Enhanced Radio Resource Management (eRRM™) based on distributed algorithms and coordination among the cells. It optimizes frequency reuse, data throughput and QoS performance across the neighboring cells.

With these major advances for small cells and transparent HetNets, it looks as if D-SON is here to stay.

Summary

Overall, SON offers an automated, mechanized solution that simplifies the control of complex network behaviors by analyzing the terabytes of data being generated from multi-vendor, multi-technology, multi-layered heterogeneous network (HetNet) infrastructures. SON systems are becoming a necessity for future mobile network operations to automatically configure, optimize, and heal network issues with minimal human intervention.

It goes without saying that SON implementations should be built to allow extensions offering a platform that can incorporate new optimization ideas and advanced use cases. Scalability, with respect to the number of cells and applied network load is crucial as is the flexibility to support a variety of different equipment vendor implementations and operator-specific policies. As mobile networks become more complex it is increasingly important to have a SON architecture that is robust under rapidly changing circumstances with defense mechanisms to minimize outages.

C-SON and D-SON must learn to co-exist. Some vendors are already promoting ‘Hybrid SON’ that meets the needs of both OSS automation and real time millisecond configuration. It is becoming clear that both approaches are needed if SON is to fulfill its potential to transform the economics of network operations and improve customer experience at the same time.