Autonomics and SDN for self-organizing networks

This paper presents the study of the relationship between Autonomic Network Management (ANM) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) under the prism of Long Term Evolution (LTE) Self-Organizing Networks (SONs). The ANM and SDN paradigms, besides sharing a few common goals, have shown to be complementary to each other in terms of level of abstractions and expectations. In particular, we consider the Unified Management Framework (UMF) introduced in the FP7 UNIVERSELF project, which focuses on higher level self-* functionality, often assuming as given a fictional adaptation layer between such autonomics and the managed infrastructure. On the other hand, SDN architectures provide by design a uniform control substrate for the programmatic management of network resources through vendor-agnostic APIs. However, despite the popularity of flow-based control in core networks and data centers, a similar widely-adopted abstraction to that of the "flow" have yet to be defined for radio access and SONs. In this work we propose such a novel abstraction layer designed to realize SON programmability. The prototype Autonomic SDN (AutoSDN) controller has been integrated with UMF to self-optimize an LTE-Advanced heterogeneous network, enabling SON functions to be provided by 3rd parties and to be hot-plugged into the network.