Self-organizing networks (SONs) are collections of control and management methods and optimization algorithms that are attracting attention as a means of achieving economical services in the next-generation mobile network.The aim with them is to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by having traditionally manual tasks like design, configuration, optimization, and operation/monitoring performed autonomously on the network side as much as possible.When a SON is introduced, it is important that the SON functions be applied with minimal impact on the existing network, that the entire network be optimized and not just the radio network, and that the SON itself be enhanced as needed.This article outlines the SON concept, describes the technologies of automatic load balancing and coverage/capacity optimization as SON use cases for optimizing a radio access network, and describes a system architecture for implementing SON.
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