Telecommunications Management Network (TMN)

Contents:

Executive Summary
UHC's Vision of TMN's potential
UHC and TMN

For an overview of the standards of TMN consult ITU's TMN Roadmap.

For a more elaborate view of UHC's vision of the commercial potential of TMN as an integrator technology, try the presentation "The perspective of TMN".

Read also a Comparison of TMN, SNMP and Corba, a comparison of the leading Management technologies.

For more links to TMN relevant sites, visit the Form Web Site.

Executive Summary

ITU, the international organisation for standardisation in the telecommunication world and ISO the international Standardisation Organisation have jointly defined a concept for standardising protocols for monitoring and management of telecommunications equipment called: TMN (Telecommunications Management Network). This concept encompasses nearly all the issues related to systems management of telecommunications systems. This means support for planning, provisioning, installing, maintaining, operating and administering these systems. The concepts of TMN are described in the ITU-T recommendations M.3010, X.700 and X.701.

The TMN Architectural model as defined by ITU in the standard M.3010.

TMN incorporates a wide range of standards that covers system management issues like

• Fault Management
• Configuration Management
• Accounting
• Performance Management
• Security Management

(Often called the FCAPS model)

These standards include advanced information models and protocols to mediate information between system components. The most well known standard interface from TMN is the “q3” interface, which is based on CMIP and FTAM.

TMN is projected to penetrate and influence most aspects of operational, tactical and strategical management of telecommunication systems. The application of TMN technology promises improved efficiency and flexibility, hence considerable savings for telecommunication services providers in the future.

The TMN model projects a hierarchical layered management architecture that results in separation of concerns and encapsulation of functions. Though conceived for telecommunications networks and services, it provides a general and rich framework that can be applied to any complex systems management environment.

An object-oriented approach has been followed whereby network or system resources are manipulated through abstractions known as "managed objects", handled by applications in agent roles and accessed by applications in manager roles through the OSI management service/protocol (CMIS/CMIP). The object-oriented approach also promises unprecedented reusability of software solutions.

The relevant ISO/ITU-T work, though still evolving, has now reached a stage of completion that allows management systems exploiting this powerful framework to be built. The definition of managed objects for the management of all types of network and system resources is an ongoing activity.

UHC's vision of TMN's potential

Today it is possible to integrate IT-systems from different vendors, e.g. real estate agents, banks and credit associations to combine information and functions from these systems into new interesting services. These new constellations may be spread all over the globe, only connected via Internet.

But with these possibilities, the new emerging challenge is the task of making these distributed systems work 24 hours non-stop. A communication failure with your bank right across the street may be caused by a software-failure in a communications node on the other side of the globe, almost impossible to locate. The potential consequences of such failures and the inability to locate and remedy them immediately can hardly be underestimated in the light of the current development of international Internet-commerce.

Imagine what consequences would be if the international air traffic system had developed to the current level without an equivalent development of the communication between the air-traffic control centers, simply shipping off the aeroplanes "into the blue sky" and hope for the best. If something went wrong, then we had no way of determining what became of the aeroplane, what went wrong or who was responsible.

The great potential of TMN is its ability to enable the task of integrating management of network-based services across vendors, customers and technologies. It is a complete system architecture for the integration of management systems for telecommunication networks, all the way from the light-fibre's up to the C.E.O. and out to the customers. TMN offers a set of standardised protocols and information models for the exchange of management information between IT-systems, a bit the same way as when air-traffic control centres exchange information in English using a specific standardised terminology to exchange flight information in an efficient and un-ambiguous way.

It is therefore UHC’s vision that the need for the technologies and concepts in TMN will follow the explosive growth of internet-based commerce with some delay - when the importance of a 24-hours availability becomes a crucial factor of survival for the service providers.

UHC and TMN

UHC’s expertise in TMN is based on a long list of international development projects regarding TMN, starting back in 1989. The software marketed by UHC is thus based on 10 years experience and testing of the concepts in pilot installations and deployed products. It is therefore a mature technology, although it is was marketed as a product in 1996.

UHC was the first company in the world to offer TMN technology on Windows NT. This has also enabled UHC to offer genuine TMN-based solutions at a price orders of magnitude lower than its competitors.

UHC has been involved in several EU projects under the ACTS program, and was one of the few companies to be presented in ACTS’ yearly publication "impACTS" in 1998 as a significant contributor.

Although TMN is an extremely promising business area, the complexity of the technology and the scarceness of experience and mature tools makes it a disturbing affair to render into, unless you have professional experienced guidance. That is what we at UHC sincerely believe that we can offer you.