SON Coordination in a Unified Management Framework

The adoption of autonomic features in network management becomes a necessity to cope with the increasing complexity of the telecommunications ecosystem. The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of Unified Management Framework (UMF) developed in the FP7 UniverSelf project. The core of UMF comprises three functional blocks, namely Governance, Coordination and Knowledge which allow to efficiently operate autonomic mechanisms such as SON functionalities in the radio access network. These are denoted as Network Empowerment Mechanisms (NEMs) that, by means of policies, enforce operator business and operation objectives. The paper focuses on the Coordination core block of UMF, and its instantiation to the problem of SON coordination for managing LTE-Advanced a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) with relays. Prototype description and results are described so as to illustrate the value and applicability of the proposed framework.