During his presentation at the LTE LatAm summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this week, ZTE’s Sean Cai asked participants whether they felt their networks were truly ready for “the data explosion.”
The answer for most operators, he said, was a resounding ‘no’. The exponential growth of applications, said Cai, is spurring data traffic growth and demand beyond anything operators would have previously imagined. In addition, those same operators have to deal with increased network complexity and over four million multi-network parameters, none of which makes life particularly easy.
ZTE’s answer to the problem, said Cai, is SON – which is the firm’s so called smart network solution. SON, said Cai, goes a long way towards simplifying network design, deployment configuration and even testing.
Using Plug & Play eNodeB technology, Cai said ZTE could set up a secure tunnel, SW Update, node authentication, Setup of transmission and even self testing in 75% less time than regular configuration would take.
Indeed, Cai claimed that the one touch deployment would seriously reduce any operator’s planning and configuration efforts, as well as reduce commercial trial testing time.
This, he explained, is due to SON’s self-discovering and self-test capabilities, coverage detection abilities, its single layer MRO, ANR (Automatic Neighbor Relation) and automated configuration of physical cell identity.
Meanwhile, features still in development for SON include CCO, MLB, Multi Layer MRO, ICIC SON, self-healing and MDT. Advanced features that will also make it down ZTE’s pipeline in the near future include self-learning, QoS Optimization and capacity expansion based on loading.
