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Future wireless networks (LTE and beyond) will experience a continuous growth regarding the number of network elements with increasingly complex interrelations between the configuration of multiple network elements (NEs). A related trend is the seamless integration of multiple radio technologies into a single heterogeneous wireless network. Both developments increase network management complexity and require new management concepts with a very high degree of automation such as Self-Organizing Network (SON) concepts, which are currently discussed in the network operator (NGMN), research, and standardization (3GPP) communities.SON functions have to be coordinated and supervised in an automated way in order to enable a stable system operation with tight control over the system behavior by the network operator together with a high degree of automation. Based on a detailed analysis of the requirements for the coordination, a policy-based approach to realize the coordination-related decision making based on the network configuration and SON function context is presented. Results for two use cases (fully automatic hardware to site mapping and coverage & capacity optimization) are presented to show the applicability of the developed approach to diverse SON use cases.

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Abstract-The trend for future mobile networks is to move away from Network Elements (NEs) delivered with specially tailored configurations towards off-the-shelf products. The configurations of NEs are automatically created with respect to their context including information on location and configuration of neighboring NEs. To minimize time-consuming and errorprone human interaction, automatic behavior is required for all stages of a NE's life cycle. The possibility to pre-assess the effects of configuration changes is inevitable in order to avoid service degradation caused by unnecessary reconfigurations. Graph coloring-based Physical Cell ID (PCID) assignment for LTE networks was introduced previously. The foundation on graph coloring theory allowed to transfer knowledge from this domain to the task of PCID assignment in order to pre-asses if an assignment is possible and how many PCIDs are required. Now the focus lies on adaptations of the basic approach to satisfy additional operator requirements such as safety margins. Those adaptations should provide equally good results in terms of used PCIDs with only minimal impact on costs and operation and maintenance tasks. Variations of the basic PCID assignment approach are discussed to address other types of problems.