A neighbor relation whitelisting method for wireless cellular systems

By the introduction of new methods such as device to device communications, massive multiple input multiple output systems that operate in millimeter wave bands, vehicle to infrastructure communications, wireless cellular communications systems entered a new phase of their evolution through 5G and beyond. This new paradigm pushes the boundaries of communications further from human device interaction and communicating entities becomes available at every phase or stage of human life. These important changes also come with important problems to be tackled, e.g., optimization of such complex networks in an automatic manner with the least possible human intervention. Moreover, performance of wireless cellular networks should increase to satisfy the increasing capacity demand stemming from new users and applications; the quality of service metrics should be improved everyday. Since it is impossible to achieve such complex and demanding tasks with manual operations, self organizing networks (SON) are emerged to address the optimization issues of wireless systems. One of the main functions of SON is automatic neighbor relations (ANR) which keeps the neighbor relation table of a cell optimal for strong handover (HO) performance. Besides this major task, ANR conducts whitelisting and blacklisting of cells which are the functions with significant impact on the HO performance of a cell under optimization. Thus, in this paper a comprehensive whitelisting method which utilizes histiroc HO metrics and previous blacklisting and whitelisting status of relations in the decision process is proposed. Simulation results indicate a viable increase in the number of the relations whitelisted, thus protected from unintentional deletion or deletion by other optimizing entities working in local i.e., distributed ANR.