WIM Technologies

Unison in Operation

Unison was introduced into a major European city to assist engineers with Neighbour Optimisation. Within the first week of implementation Unison was able to identify many high value neighbour relations specifically on vendor boundaries.

• Over 500 000 new neighbour attempts were made as a results of new neighbour additions. Of these attempts 99.7% were successful.
• Due to Unison being vendor agnostic, it was able to discover high value neighbour relations on vendor boundaries which were overlooked by vendor specific OSS solutions.
• uniSON's tight intergration with Google Maps helped the engineers visualise coverage patterns that were not evident using vendor specific tools.
• On some cells almost 30% of the handovers now occurring were a result of the neighbours added by uniSON.
• As per 3GPP standards, the LTE neighbour algorithms built inside vendor specific equipment are based purely on measurement recordings. By analysing handover stats on a weekly basis, Unison was able to identify erroneous neighbours that were being added because they were not downtilted correctly and were overshooting.





• The Operator acknowledged that the vendor LTE ANR algorithm required additional support from a software platform such as uniSON to further boost its value.
• Unison identified neighbours that needed to be blacklisted as they were overshooting.
• PM stats for the top 10 cells where missing neighbours were identified showed a definitive Drop Call Rate improvement during the month of September as per the illustrations.

How Unison compares against Vendor tools

This case study highlights the results found when comparing Unison to a vendor tool used at an Operator. It aims to highlight gaps within the optimization process, by stating facts that are reported by vendor OSS tools and making inferences regarding the difficulties faced by the engineers in performing optimization tasks, mainly neighbour optimization.

Unison vs Vendor OSS Tool
Unison	Vendor OSS Tool
Continuous Neighbour Analysis User can perform continuous neighbour analysis. No need to manually retrieve data from different sources.	Due to the large number of results retrieved, it was quite a cumbersome task for the user to work out Missing and Redundant Neighbours.
User Definable profiles Provides a flexible mechanism to assign different user definable profiles to different areas therefore providing more accurate results.	Does not allow user to apply different profiles hence does not provide enough flexibility to the user.
Google map based This allows for comprehensive Geo-spatial analysis.	Does not provide any form of geo-spatial analysis resulting in a lot of data being made available in Excel sheets. The Engineer has to manually import data in some way within MAP-INFO or GOOGLE EARTH in order to work out which neighbours are really required and which may be a result of overshooting cells.
All forms of neighbour analysis are available including IRAT neighbours Redundant neighbours can be removed before adding new ones in the same plan. Users can select a redundant as well as a missing profile to perform analysis on a set of cells or an entire RNC.	Due to the large number of results retrieved from TOOL B it would be quite a cumbersome task for the user to work out Missing and Redundant Neighbours.
Geography of Sites All analysis takes into account the geography of the site. Azimuth, tilt and height are all considered when making a decision on what is the most suitable neighbour plan. The rules can then be configured by the users allowing for complete flexibility.	Collects data from the OSS regarding Site locations but this data is compromised if engineers don’t load the correct locations on the equipment, which is usually the case.
Integration of Drive Test information Drive test information is integrated and the user can then visualize drive test routes on the GIS. It is possible to zoom into areas of bad coverage or quality and start performing detailed analysis of the issues that may exist pertaining to over shooters, swapped sectors as well as missing neighbours	No drive data integration
Bulk Overshooting Analysis Before performing any neighbour analysis, the user can perform a bulk overshooting analysis providing a specific criteria which best suits his/her planning area. uniSON then suggests a list of all cells that are overshooting in an area. This information can be further corroborated with the use of drive test data.	Provides a separate report for overshooting cells. The user will also have to consider this before the neighbours can be added correctly. This analysis will have to be performed first, again requiring more time and effort from the engineer.
ACTIVE SET Handover For RNC’s where measurement information isn’t available, the user can very easily create a new profile within uniSON which can make use of ACTIVE SET Handover information in order to work out which neighbours are missing.	Not supported- measurement based system only.
Allows users to define their own “Optimization Plan” All changes that they are interested in (identified by the tool) can then be allocated to this plan and exported into a format that is very close to the OPERATOR X Work order format. Minimal massaging of the formats done- saving them time.	Exports to excel but data needs to be massaged.
XML/MML Scripts Capability to generate Neighbour creation/deletion XML scripts that can be run into the network directly.	No Scripting capability.