Impact of Self-Organizing Networks Deployment on Wireless Service Provider Businesses in China

Abstract

Decoupling of revenues with network traffic and extreme penetration of expenses in wireless network leads to the critical situation for wireless service providers (WSP), as more wireless network is complex due to its heterogeneity in the context of planning, software & hardware installation, radio parameters setting, drive testing, optimization, healing and maintenance. These operations are time-consuming, labor & budget-intensive and error-prone if activated manually. Hence new approaches have to be designed and applied to meet those demands in a cost-effective way, Self-organizing networks (SON), is a promising approach to handle manual tasks with autonomous manners. More specifically the self-directed functions (self-planning, self-deployment, self-configuration, self-optimization and self-healing) are aid to reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX), implementation expenditure (IMPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX). In this study, first we investigate the aforementioned impact factors of cost combined with self-functions. Then, we analyze the relative cost benefits causing from deploying the SON functions, using the economical method to have more precise results concerning those potential benefits. At last, the result shows that there is a significant difference in expenses and revenues of WSP with and without SON after enabling self-functions in wireless network.