Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
In the current, fast-developing ICT industry, mobile networks are evolving in heterogeneous and complex ways. It’s also true that this disorganized growth requires standardization of some automatic tasks to keep networks operating effortlessly and make them quickly profitable. The other reality is that some jobs will never be the same after the introduction of new technology. By combining process mechanization and tasks to be executed, LTE self-organizing networks (LTE-SON) will be responsible for changing the job of the radio frequency optimization engineer definitively. Therefore, it is important ask: “What will the mission of the optimization engineer be in this innovative scenario?”
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First, it is important to mention that the RF optimization engineer job is one of the most intricate roles in the technical mobile network area, requiring a solid combination of theoretical knowledge such as radio frequency propagation, statistic traffic theories, neighboring determination algorithms, quality of service parameters, with a lot of vendor specific procedures and practical field expertise. The main purpose of this role is to assure that the required service level agreements are fulfilled and that the mobile network obeys international performance standards for its customers.
The day-to-day duties such engineers accomplish include collecting network data and configuring software and hardware parameters relative to radio base stations, also named ENodeBs in LTE by the 3GPP standards, to achieve the performance goal of optimal quality for the service provider’s customers.
Well, self-organizing and self-optimizing networks, as their names indicate, are standardized software features by 3GPP which automate the equipment and network configuration, organization and optimization, easing the engineer’s tasks once the mobile networks begin to become very complicated to operate and maintain because of multiple technologies and a high number of elements. One of the main purposes of LTE-SON is to save operating expenses, by automating typical manual tasks and reducing the time-to-market for brand new 4G networks.
LTE-SON started to be standardized in 2007, with the 3GPP LTE Release 8. In this release, the initial features are automatic inventory – which collects network elements parameters and characteristics; automatic software download – which upgrades and modifies the ENodeBs without human intervention; automatic neighbor relation – which programs the parameters that guarantee continuity of cellular coverage; and automatic physical cell ID assignment – which configures the identity number of a cell (singular coverage part of an ENodeB).
In Release 9 (2008), the latest standard for LTE-SON, four more features were added to the initial standard: coverage & capacity optimization – a dynamic algorithm that finds the optimal relation between the number of users and the coverage of a cell; mobility optimization – which ensures seamless mobility and configures its parameters for any service; RACH optimization – which verifies the best solution for the reverse access channel and which the customer can use to make and answer both voice and data calls; and load balancing optimization – which distributes traffic within the system efficiently. The LTE-SON features tend to keep the contracted quality of service for each application. All those features are installed on the ENodeBs and in a centralized optimization entity in order to enable more remote jobs.
The automated tasks in LTE-SON, as stated in the up-to-date 4G standard release, comprise about 70% of the duties of an RF optimization engineer, and many others are being discussed in current standardizations such as energy saving features, mobile device radio frequency and QoS reporting to minimize the amount of drive-tests. Yes, the optimization function will be mechanized, and the initial definition of the RF optimization engineer’s role is changing, but engineers should not worry about the answer to the question: “What will the mission of the optimization engineer be in this innovative scenario?” The heterogeneity of multifaceted, multi-technology networks will provide a lot of work to be done.
Maria Luiza Kunert is a Brazilian telecommunications executive with almost 20 years experience in the wireless market. Kunert has a degree in electronic engineering and has worked for network infrastructure vendors such as Ericsson and NEC as well as for service providers such as Vivo. Since 2009, she has worked as regulation adviser for Anatel, the Brazilian telecommunications government agency.
