Towards Future Telecommunications Management Architectures

Abstract

Over the last two decades many communications management architectures for wide area networking have been proposed and several have been adopted by industry e.g. Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) Architecture (M3100) which is predominately based on the Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP), and the Enterprise Management architectures of the Internet world which are based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). However, the last five years have seen the rapid acceptance and adoption, by the computer community, of object oriented distributed processing techniques and technologies. The importance of these approaches can be seen in the international standards such as Open Distributed Processing (X901). Within the telecommunications service and network management domain, an early champion of the distributed computing paradigm was the Telecommunication Information Network Architecture consortium (TINA-C). This industry-led standard proposed an architecture for both network and service management based on distributed processing techniques and emergent standards. Industrial Fora such as Tele Management Forum are currently trying to provide a technology roadmap of how emergent computing technologies can be introduced into existing telecommunication management architectures.