The area I selected to focus on is self healing/optimizing (SON) 4G wireless networks. While not as sexy as flying cars or designer babies the impact to our society is very important. Today’s society has become dependent on wireless communication, most notably cellphones. We use them for casual conversations, business deals, security, and safety. When they are not available we are left without an important tool to communicate. The loss of that tool can and has cost people their lives. The acronym SON has a few common definitions. I have seen it listed as self optimizing, and as self organizing networks. A key concept is that by a series of algorithms a wireless network can reconfigure or make change to account of external conditions. Those external conditions can be major traffic shifts, cell site outages, others today unknown conditions. Today, the idea of a SON system is widely desired. In the LTE specification there is a specification for the development of SON. A few of the vendors are starting to develop simple systems. In all cases, the vendors doing this development are really talking about the end state as in complete self healing, plug and play hardware, and self optimization. However, the actual implementation of these solutions is far closer to the Model T than it is to flying cars. If we were to look at this on the Hype Curve, we are at the peak of inflated expectations. This can spur development. However, there will be a trough of disillusionment and it will be at the point that SON will either gain its legs and move into mass adoption or stall until it receives another push.
SON has a number of supporting forces. First and foremost is that is current has momentum. A lot of great ideas never reach maturity because not enough people believe in those ideas. Momentum is not enough to push the technology into mass adoption. With SON it has a few of the “AL” words that also support it. The first is that there are strong economical reasons for the technology to continue to be developed. In theory SON should reduce the complexity of network design thereby allowing few engineers to design the network. It should also improve resource utilization. A well turned SON system would be able to move resources around based upon need and thereby reduced total cost. There is also global support for SON. SON specifications or maybe API is a better term is part of the LTE specification. LTE will be the 4G technology for >95% of the world. This massive size should aid in the development of SON. There is also a social force that will help in the development of SON. Society is becoming more dependent on wireless communications. It is starting to come to the point that the government is seeing wireless phones as a necessity for the safety and security of its citizens. The need for the wireless networks to be more reliable particularly during natural disasters is becoming more understood. It is possible that if we have another disaster like Katrina we will see further regulation on the wireless industry. It is sad but always true that it take disasters to help people see the need for great safety and security. Society’s use of these devices has changes, and so that technology needs to change to keep up with people expectations.
There are also forces that could slow or stop the development of the technology. The most notably is economical reasons. Today wireless carriers have to expend huge amounts of capital to deploy LTE. Because the costs are so large they are looking for ways to cut expense or at least control expenses. One way can be to invent only in what is absolutely necessary. It is like buying a car. If you feel you cannot afford the cost of the car you start scaling back features. SON is a feature that might never get enough funding to move past its rudimentary beginnings. A second force that can slow or hurt SON is trust of automation. Current vendors understand this well. They are talking about the need to have a system that allows for first recommendation, then semi-automation, and finally full automation. The concept of SON is not new. There are even small examples of it working today in wireless networks. However, there have also been many failures. These historical failures have lead to many people that are hesitant. This fear of turning the keys over to a computer has engineers concerned.
To understand the development of SON a Delphi model would work very well. There are many technical experts that could contribute to an analysis of its success or failure. This would also help in charting a course that would be more holistic and could help push the technology forward. How this is done has its pluses and minuses. Because there currently are not any strong political views on the topic, unlike global warming, I think that this would be a good topic for an open conversation among experts. It would not be possible to get everyone together but instead it would be possible to due the conversation over the internet.
http://business.motorola.com/experiencelte/pdf/LTEOperabilitySONWhitePaper.pdf
http://www.3gpp.org/LTE
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