Optimistic concurrency control in self-organizing networks using automatic coordination and verification

In a mobile Self-Organizing Network (SON), the SON coordinator has been introduced to control the application of Configuration Management (CM) changes, in order to prevent conflicts between independent SON function instances running in parallel. However, there is always a trade-off between stability and efficiency. On one hand we need to avoid conflicts, on the other we want fast, parallelized execution of SON function instances. Additionally, the concept of SON verification has been developed to automatically detect and correct degradations that arise from unexpected side-effects of (parallel) CM changes made by SON functions or human operators. However, as the number of function instances increases in the future networks, the performance of the SON coordinator becomes critical, i.e. excessive serialization is no longer possible. In this paper, we show how both, SON coordination and verification, can work together and how the cooperation enables a more efficient SON without having to compromise on its stability. This can be achieved by extending the SON function execution coordination to SON verification and by dynamically adjusting the coordination policies between more relaxed and more strict concurrency control strategies based on the feedback from the verification.