Huawei today announced that it has successfully completed the world's first test of an LTE self-organizing network (SON) with T-Mobile in Innsbruck, Austria. Through the solution's ability to configure, optimize and recover automatically, Huawei says the LTE SON will offer operators operational cost savings associated with network planning, network deployment and network optimization.
Using T-Mobile's existing eNodeBs, the test aims at verifying Automatic Neighbour Relation (ANR) functionality in Huawei's SON solution. The test result is said to show a 'highly successful' handover rate and demonstrates that the SON solution is able to automatically establish and optimize neighbour relations, and satisfies the requirements of future LTE commercial networks. As network topology changes, the LTE SON solution will ensure a high level of network connectivity and optimization of network-wide performance, says Huawei.
"As a pioneer in the development of next-generation mobile network (NGMN), T-Mobile marked the next step in testing future technology with our test network in Innsbruck. We are delighted to see that key innovations like network automation are already part of this project", commented Rüdiger Köster, Technology Director of T-Mobile Austria.
"With the latest SON solution, Huawei is able to deploy an LTE network with the best performance in a cost-effective way." said, Ying Weimin, President of LTE, Huawei, "As a leader in providing end-to-end mobile broadband solutions, Huawei is committed to accelerating the commercialization of LTE technology through providing solutions to reduce the cost per bit."
Huawei's SON commercial solution was released in Q2 2009 and is currently offered as part of Huawei's suite of LTE solutions. Additional features of SON, such as the Mobile Robust Optimization (MRO) feature will be tested by Huawei and T-Mobile in the next phase.