SELFNET Framework self‐healing capabilities for 5G mobile networks

Abstract Nowadays, mobile networks are complex sets of heterogeneous equipments that use proprietary management applications, resulting in a huge expenditure, a large effort and a time‐consuming process to manage all network elements by means of currently manual or semi‐automatical approaches. With the emergency of new technologies, such software‐defined networking, network function virtualization, and cloud computing, the current configurable networks are capable of becoming programmable, which will facilitate advanced autonomous network management. This article presents capabilities of a novel framework proposed by the SELFNET project that enables highly autonomic management functionalities. It focuses on the proposed self‐healing use case that can be applied to reactively or preventively deal with the detected or predicted network failures. The SELFNET can provide the upcoming 5G system: an autonomic management framework, which brings a remarkable reduction upon operational expenditure and a substantial improvement of quality‐of‐experience(QoE) in terms of reliability, availability, service continuity and security. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.