Nokia’s self-organising network software throws out the toolbox

• The aim is an automatic and hands-off ability to detect, categorize and solve network problems
• Nokia claims that it will also organise network slicing...
• ... and you don’t need to be an engineer to work with it

Nokia today has launched an upgraded version of its ‘cognitive Self-Organizing Network (SON) software’ which aims to provide zero-touch automation for 5G CSPs.  

Nokia says this offering replaces the traditional operator console  with an objective-driven dashboard which can be mastered by a variety of stakeholders, from the chief experience officers to the market engineer.

The cognitive SON can automatically detect, categorize and solve network problems and Nokia claims this results in a significant reduction of manual work and rigorous technical analysis that  network operators would otherwise need to do.

The software upgrades automatically without the need for the operator to manually trigger the request, and it offers programmability with a Software Development Kit and open APIs to further increase speed and flexibility.

Nokia claims the software  features a vendor-agnostic network slice management function to automate the radio slice life cycle and resource optimization using its machine learning  and automation capabilities and will be able to optimize each slice separately. 

Given Nokia’s apparent fealty to the objectives of the open RAN ‘movement’ it will be interesting to understand if the Cognitive SON’s vendor agnostic nature will extend to an ability to work with disaggregated components from other vendors. We’ve reached out to the company with that question and will update the story when we get a reply.