A constraint optimization-based resolution of verification collisions in self-organizing networks

The verification of Configuration Management (CM) changes is an important step in the operation of a Self-Organizing Network (SON). In order to perform its tasks, a verification mechanism makes use of an observation and a correction time window. In the first window it assesses the impact of deployed CM changes by monitoring the network's Performance Management (PM) data. Furthermore, it partitions the network in one or more verification areas, detects anomalies within them, and generates CM undo requests, each having the purpose to set CM parameters to some previous state. In the second window it deploys those requests to the network. However, two or more verification areas might be overlapping and share anomalous cells. As a consequence, we have verification collisions preventing two or more generated CM undo requests to be deployed at same time. Thereby, the verification mechanism might not be able to deploy all generated CM undo actions for the given correction window. In this paper, we propose a method that makes use of constraint optimization techniques to identify which requests can be merged together in order to meet the time requirement. We achieve our goal by using constraint softening based on so-called performance rating values of the requests. We evaluate our method in two different scenarios. First, we highlight the need for handling verification collisions by observing CM and PM data of a real Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. Second, a simulation study shows the ability of our method to keep the network performance at a high level.