Huawei Launches World’s First ANR for Commercial Use

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, announced the successful commercial launch of the Automatic Neighbor Relation (ANR) feature on LTE networks in Cologne, the fourth largest city in Germany. The ANR function can automatically manage and optimize the relationship of neighbor cells, improve the efficiency of operation and maintenance and reduce the operating expenses.

After stringent testing and acceptance procedures, Huawei successfully launched the ANR feature into commercial use on the LTE network in Cologne. This release marks the first time that an ANR feature has been successfully launched on a commercial network in the world.

Deployed by Huawei, Cologne's LTE network was officially launched for commercial use in April, 2011. In October, 2011, Huawei began verifying ANR functions and features for use on the LTE network, including neighbor detection, automatic adding, and neighbor deletion. Now that the ANR feature has been in commercial operation for three months, it allows for the automatic management and optimization of all neighbor relations without human intervention. It also is able to reach a handover success rate of 99 percent when network performance is stable.

In the future, mobile networks featuring multiple bands, multiple modes, and multiple layers will experience exponential growth of neighboring cells, making for complicated management of neighbor relations. Within traditional GSM and UMTS networks, neighbor relations are managed and optimized manually, resulting in huge operation and maintenance costs. As one feature of Huawei’s SingleSON solution, ANR supports automatic management and optimization of neighbor relations for networks that feature multiple modes and layers. This not only improves the efficiency of network deployment, but also has the advantage of reducing labor costs, while retaining network performance.

With the growth in popularity of smart devices and the bandwidth support needed for social networks, mobile broadband networks are challenged with a burst of data traffic, pushing mobile communication in to a Giga World. As an operator's best business partner, Huawei launched the SingleSON solution that helps operators efficiently manage networks that feature multiple modes and layers, reduces the cost of operation and maintenance, and enhances subscriber network experience.

At the upcoming 2012 Mobile World Congress, Huawei plans to display its leading SingleSON solution, which includes features such as the multi-mode ANR.