SON

The whole point of SON was to stop engineers hand-tuning thousands of cells one parameter at a time. It splits into three jobs that get grouped together but behave quite differently. Self-configuration handles a new site coming online — it pulls its software, transport config and initial radio parameters with minimal manual touch, so a node ideally joins the network close to plug-and-play. Self-optimization is the ongoing part: neighbour lists, handover thresholds and load settings get nudged as conditions change. Self-healing watches for failures, like a cell going down, and reacts — for example raising the power or tilt of surrounding cells to fill the coverage hole until the fault is fixed.

In practice SON runs in two flavours: distributed (logic sits in the eNB/gNB) and centralized (logic sits in the management system with a wider view). Most real deployments are a hybrid, and the centralized side is increasingly where ANR, MRO and MLB policies are coordinated.