Bringing Java to TMN

Abstract

The Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) ITU, ISO, and NMF international standards define and support a network architecture for the management of public telecommunication networks. These standards address the TMN architecture, interoperability, services and protocols, general information modeling, a set of specific system management information functions and models, and recently a set of C++ interfaces to these components collectively called the NMF TMN C++ APIs. In addition, many vendor platforms and tools are available in support of these standards. Java is a programming language and virtual machine that has recently received significant attention and momentum. It is natural, therefore, to consider how best to use Java in a TMN. Although few of the contributions and promises of Java are new, Java has taken the best of breed programming language technologies to truly improve on issues of portability and productivity. This has been further enhanced by a concise and portable definition of Java's virtual machine. In this paper we suggest a pragmatic approach to apply Java in TMN. This approach uses Java to strengthen and enhance the TMN state-of-the-art. Java is applied to areas for which the state-of-the-art of TMN is lacking. In doing so, we emphasis Java's strengths while maintaining interoperability with already deployed technologies. Our approach is in contrast to more radical approaches which suggest widespread deployment of Java virtual machines throughout the core TMN infrastructure and telecommunications devices.