Constantly increasing network usage, ever more complex service offers and the growing obsolescence of manual, time-consuming, error prone operations mean communication service providers (CSPs) must focus on optimizing their infrastructure. Self-organizing network (SON) solutions, for backhaul and core networks as well as radio access networks (RAN), can help them to do this.
SON is important in mobile backhaul networks because, in the drive to deliver end to end high quality services at low cost, the RAN is only part of the picture. With its basic self-configuration, self-optimization and self-healing capabilities, SON has been widely adopted, and is being deployed by a growing number of CSPs. But what if you combine its functionalities with NFV/SDN? The concepts behind SDN and NFV not only simplify the challenges that SON has to overcome to go beyond the radio access networks, they also extend the possible functionalities of SON solutions.
