Integrated TMN Service Management

Graham Chen, Qinzheng Kong, Jason Etheridge and Paul Foster

The deregulation of the global telecommunication industry has seen a change in the business and operational environment in which services are deployed and managed. The requirements have intensified to provide a management framework for telecommunication networks and services across multiple technology domains and using multiple management technologies.

This White Paper describes an integrated TMN service management architecture which provides an environment for different service management functions (TMN FCAPS) and different management domains (SML, NML and EML) to be integrated. To further substantiate this architecture, a proof of concept system was built to demonstrate the integration concepts.

The research and development work reported in this paper focuses on the following two aspects of integration:

• The integration between TMN network and service management functions.
• The integration between different service management functions.

A proof of concept system was developed to demonstrate such integration. It consists of the following components:

• Generic service ordering and provisioning
• Connection management based on a generic network model concept
• Service management based upon service level agreement management and customer service management concepts

This paper reports this work and the experiences gained from this research.

Integrated service management, customer service management, service ordering, service provisioning, connection management, CORBA, TMN

To appear in the Journal of Network and Systems Management, Plenum Press.