Motorola Upgrades Its LTE Self-Organizing Network

Motorola has announced several improvements to its LTE self-organizing network (SON) platform to enable greater network optimization. Motorola's SON is a 3GPP Release 8 standards-compliant solution that draws upon the company's research in network autonomics.

"We designed our LTE SON solution with advanced features and leading algorithms that go beyond the standards to offer a solution that helps operators reduce operational expenses from day one of their LTE network deployment," said Fred Gabbard, vice president, Motorola Networks. "In this next release, we are leveraging our heritage in radio frequency, OFDM expertise, cell designing and optimization techniques gleaned from years of real-world experience with public safety networks to offer more features and functionality, providing even greater network optimization and savings."

Motorola's LTE SON deploys quickly with limited technical expertise and is an integral part of an LTE network that delivers operational expense savings by automating previously manual steps involved in planning, deploying, optimizing and operating the network - hence reducing or eliminating the need for new operation and management resources that typically are required to manage an additional network technology.

Deployed in July 2009, Motorola's first-generation SON is on a live LTE network at its test facility in Swindon, United Kingdom. At the site, operators can watch the real-time optimization of a live LTE network and see first-hand the efficiency of Motorola's SON solution to plan, deploy, operate and optimize an LTE system.

Motorola's experience with a live network plays an instrumental role in developing the software for this next-generation solution. The new features of Motorola's LTE SON include enhancements to auto neighbor relation (ANR) with inter-radio access technology support, automated session (call) tracing, automated cell outage detection, and SON change tracking and operator override. These allow operators to increase productivity and reduce system errors, which improves network quality and customer satisfaction, and ultimately decreases time to market.

The distributed architecture design of Motorola's LTE SON and the maturity of its algorithms means the network can respond more quickly by making intelligent and faster decisions at the network level. This approach eliminates the need to create and send additional, non-billable traffic onto the network, saving an operator's precious network capacity so it can be better utilized to serve customers by lessening backhaul requirements. In contrast, the central server approach generates network traffic that must be transmitted back and forth to the central server, making that bandwidth unavailable to meet customers' needs and requiring more of the network to be used for backhaul.