ANR
Automatic Neighbor Relations: SON function that automatically discovers and configures neighbor cell relationships, eliminating manual neighbor planning.
Before ANR, neighbour planning was a genuine chore: someone built and maintained the neighbour relation tables by hand, and a missing relation meant dropped calls at a cell edge because the UE had nowhere to hand over to. ANR automates that. The trick is it leans on the handset — when a UE reports a strong cell that the serving cell doesn't recognise, it reads that cell's identity (CGI) over the air, and the network uses it to add the relation automatically.
A few things to know on the job. ANR maintains the Neighbour Relation Table, and each relation carries flags — notably the No Remove, No HO and No X2 attributes — that let you blacklist a relation or stop ANR from deleting one you care about. It cuts manual effort dramatically, but it is not zero-touch: you still police it, because ANR can happily add relations across a frequency or a sector boundary you never wanted, and a bloated NRT has its own costs.
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