Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the newest mobile network standard in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) evolution path, promising to considerably increase the performance of mobile networks. Building a mobile network is a huge investment for a network operator, and naturally operators try to maximize the revenue and minimize the operational expenditure created by their investment. This goal can be achieved by optimizing network performance and by minimizing the manual effort of network management.

This thesis introduces the most important key performance indicators (KPI) of LTE, which can be utilized to evaluate network performance. Self-Organizing-Networks (SON) concept designed to automate many of the network management tasks is also described. Furthermore, the feasibility, advantages and disadvantages of SON use cases are evaluated.

The final part of the thesis reports research carried out on the Cell Outage Compensation (COC), a SON use case designed to alleviate the effect of a network outage. The research, which was carried out using system level simulations, consisted of investigating the effects of a typical outage, selecting the most potential control parameters and developing a COC function. As a result, the developed COC function considerably alleviated the effects of the outage in the utilized simulation environment