This chapter forays into the literature of emerging field of Self-Organization Network (SON) and its application in the area of location-based services. SON is a widely applied technology in the ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks and automatic computer networks. This chapter deal exclusively about the projects, standards and literature of SON in the context of the cellular networks and how it can aid to achieve higher position accuracy information of the subscriber. Additionally, in this chapter a clear understanding of SON taxonomy and the guidelines for the design of SON has been presented and a comparison of SON with the existing solutions about its strength and weakness has been made in this chapter. The key research areas for further development is also highlighted in this chapter. This literature will provide comprehensive guidance for anyone interested to delve into the research of SON in cellular wireless communication and location based services.
Top1. Introduction
In the past few decades, the growth of wireless communications evolved from 2G to 3G to LTE and further developing to 5G. The mobile communication has taken the field of telecommunication to the next paradigm and the entire world has become mobile. Owing to this, fresh and real time, first-hand information has become a need of the hour coupled along with the location information. The continuous need of these first hand and real-time position information has created enormous business opportunity and it has resulted in the development of new features, higher coverage, flexibility and higher interoperability. These developments have become so visible, and we have reached a situation where life without this has become unthinkable. To cope up with the competition the mobile network operators are expanding the network very aggressively and thereby extending the telecommunication networks to variable terrain. The expansion of telecom networks has provided a quantum leap to the area of position information service. Location information plays a very important role in the modern communication technologies and has become crucial in several important applications such as rescues operations, emergency and navigation, handover, delivery of high-speed data to the subscribers etc.
Positioning can be defined as a clear and unambiguous location of an individual or object with reference to a coordinate system or with reference to a known reference point. Although the information regarding the position is a very important but its association with certain time makes it more useful to understand the higher derivatives like position of an individual or an object at a particular instance of time, acceleration, speed etc. With the aid of time and position information, tracking of an individual can be performed. Thus, tracking can be defined as a position information of an individual or object with a function of time. Thus, tracking can be mathematically defined as
The integral 0 to can be defined as the continuous tracking window with start and end time.
The integral 0 to ∞ can be defined as the integration of position of an individual or object between the start time and end time of the tracking window. Hence from the above equation we can understand the tracking as the series of positioning dots of a individual or object obtained in a given frame of time window.
Equipping the position information alongside the communication technology is a very hot topic. Although the necessity of the position information has existed for many years and centuries. Actually, the art of obtaining the position information has existed for many centuries. Some millennia ago people used compass, wind direction, sea currents and celestial constellations like stars and sun to identify and estimate position and orientation. Technology of knowing position of sun and identifying the orientation and direction towards sun can be still used even today in the absence of all modern day tools to make a rough estimate of one's position. The research activities in the past decade has evolved in the course of integrating modern day communication and positioning technology in a single system that resulted in the development of standards by 3GPP. This standardization has resulted in providing a combined technology of communication and positioning that can benefit the whole network and individual users and the service providers. The location information is a basic requirement for many new technologies like cooperative communication system, delivery of new protocols and applications, etc.