AdventNet TMF EMS

Introduction

With the rapid advances in telecommunications technologies of the recent past, the number of vendors supplying equipment to carriers has increased.  More than ever, service providers need integrated end to end management across devices and technologies from many vendors. They want to manage the multi vendor/multi technology devices through a common management system that integrates across these diverse set of devices.

The Tele-Management Forum (TMF) standards for multi-technology, multi-vendor network management (TMF MTNM or TMF 513) provide new opportunities for the integrated end-to-end management and provisioning of multi-vendor networks.  The TMF Standard facilitates this by enabling a NMS to create and manage end to end connections and devices across TMF complaint EMSs.

In order to enable such integrated management, telecommunications equipment providers need to support TMF interfaces in their EMS products.   To help equipment vendors more easily deliver TMF interfaces, AdventNet provides support for the TMF interfaces as part of it's EMS framework.  This document describes the AdventNet's support for the TMF EMS interface.

Overview

AdventNet Web NMS  is an extensible and scalable element management System (EMS) framework with support for SNMP,CORBA, TL1 and many other kinds of managed network elements(NEs). The AdventNet TMF EMS is built on the Web NMS framework, and conforms to the NML-EML interface and implements TMF513/608/814 version 2.5.  The TMF EMS  will support rapid development of applications in all core management services specified in the TMF standard, including inventory management, provisioning, connection management, fault management and equipment management for SONET/SDH, DWDM and ATM networks. The applications developed based on TMF EMS  will be customizable to specific kinds of devices, and can easily be extended to new devices and technology.

The AdventNet TMF EMS is designed to flexibly and rapidly enable TMF support for new and existing EMS systems.  Equipment vendors can quickly provide necessary TMF interface support to fit into integrated management solutions sought by carriers.  This allows carriers to more easily integrate a vendors equipment and EMS systems into their network.

MTNM

MTNM is multi-technology network management. The TeleManagementForum (TMF), formerly the NMF, is a  global standards organization that develops many management and OSS standards for the telecom industry. The TMF MTNM (also known as TMF 513) is a TMF standard for integrated management of telecom networks.  It is a standard for multi-technology, multi-vendor network management that provides new opportunities for simplifying the end-to-end management and provisioning of multi-vendor networks.  It is becoming mandatory for providers of telecommunications equipment to offer a TMF MTNM complaint EMS application to support each of their network elements, making it easier to integrate these network elements into carrier networks.  Release 2.5 of this specification is described by the TMF documents listed below.

  • TMF.513, Business Agreement (BA),
  • TMF.608, Information Agreement (IA),
  • TMF.814, Interface Definition Language (IDL) Solution Set, and
  • TMF.814A, Implementation Agreement.

For more details on TeleManagementForum(TMF) please refer to www.tmforum.org

AdventNet recognizes TMF MTNM as a useful standard for Multi-Technology Multi-vendor Management.  With our new support for TMF MTNM, AdventNet customers delivering EMS systems will more easily be able to support TMF MTNM and associated standards.  AdventNet's focus on helping our customers has helped us deliver measurable business value to them in terms of productivity and time-to-market gains.  This new support for the TMF MTNM EML interface will increase the value of our customers equipment and EMS solutions in the marketplace.

Architecture

The TMF-EMS architecture is based on the AdventNet WebNMS architecture. The TMF EMS  has been split into two functional Layers.

TMF EMS Comman Architecture

TMF Corba Interface Implementation

This layer has the implementation of all the Interfaces specified in the TMF 814. All mandatory methods of managers specified in the TMF have been implemented. This layer communicates with the intermediate Layer for any database related activities.This interface responds to the requests from NMSs and other OSSs through the NML-EML interface.This Corba Layer is independent of the underlying data model and acts as a wrapper to the intermediate Layer

Intermediate Layer

This layer communicates with the database and network elements. A default implementation has been provided with TMF EMS, if TMF object model is used. The intermediate layer can be customized by a developer to support an existing vendor specific object model if required, instead of using the default TMF model supplied by AdventNet.

Key Features

  • Support for both TMF Object Model and Vendor Specific Object Model.
  • Loose coupling between modules.
  • Support for both TMF specific events and Vendor Specific events.
  • Customizable provisioning.
  • Support for connection management.
  • Database operations performed default in provisioning.
  • Highly Customizable.
  • Implementation of Fault, Topo, Notification, Configuration and Provisioning management as per the TMF specifications.
  • Fail Over/High Availability support and Load Balancing.
  • Custom Views for data.
  • Support for Application,Applet and HTML UI.
  • Support for building integrated vendor specific user Interface.

Target Market

AdventNet TMF EMS is targeted at two types of EMS Software Providers

  • Equipment Vendors    -  AdventNet TMF EMS  supports development of EMSs for NEs and also provide North-bound Support at the NML.
  • Independent Software Vendors(ISVs)    -     AdventNet TMF EMS supports development of  turnkey EMS applications by Independent Software Vendors.

Compliance

AdventNet TMF EMS is compliant to ATM/SONET/SDH/DWDM Fault and Configuration Management solution as specified in TMF 814A version 2.5 document. The AdventNet TMF EMS is built over the  AdventNet Web NMS platform. This leverages TMF EMS to go for complex solutions which needs high availability and high scalability. Also this ensures that all the basic functionalities of AdventNet Web NMS can be available in TMF EMS also.

Standards Compatibility

The following presents an overview of  the standard technologies on which the AdventNet TMF EMS is built.

S.No Standard/Technology Version Supported Key Benefits
 1. TMF 2.5 TMF provides opportunities for the end-to-end management and provisioning of multi-vendor networks.
 2.  XML  1.0  XML facilitates an efficient data interchange between components of an application and between applications by providing an extensible mechanism to describe the meaning and hierarchical structure of data. 
3.  JAXP  1.1  JAXP provides a standard API to process XML documents using DOM, SAX and XSLT. This makes it easier for applications to choose a XML parser implementation based on application need i.e. high performance parsers Vs. low memory foot print parsers etc. 
4.  JDBC  1.1 & 2.0  JDBC provides database vendor and technology independent (RDBMS, ODBMS etc.) and platform neutral API's to access data from multi-tier and client-server applications. 
5.  HTTP 1.0 & 1.1  HTTP facilitates a standard communication mechanism between Web Browser Client and the Web Server. HTTP is also used as communication mechanism between other client and servers. 
6.  JFC  JDK 1.2 & JDK 1.3  Java Foundation Classes (JFC) is a collection of widgets, facilitates building user interfaces (GUI's) that have a platform independent visual presentation. 
7.  JSP  1.1  Facilitates having dynamic content in Web pages by allowing you to embed Java code in HTML pages (You can have your presentation and dynamic content separated by using Java Beans and JSP tags. 
  8. CORBA 2.3 CORBA provides a programming language independent distributed object computing environment on which highly scalable applications can be built.
  9.             SNMP
 v1,v2c & v3
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is the most widely used management protocol, that defines the communication mechanism between the managed entities and the management station, the information model and the security and access control mechanisms for sharing management information. 
10.                TL1 1.0 Transaction Language 1 (TL1) is an ASCII based management protocol widely used in the telecom industry for managing the telecom infrastructure. Since TL1 is ASCII based, it can be used as both Human to Machine & Machine to Machine language, without any translations.

Evaluation copies of AdventNet TMF EMS are available. Please contact AdventNet sales for an evaluation copy or for a demonstration of the product. For technical support, please contact AdventNet technical support via email at nms-support@webnms.com.
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