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Principal Sponsors:
 | Embedded Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) Solutions |
2. Alternatives to TMN Network Management
TMN is a standard way to manage a telecommunications network. But many telecommunications equipment manufacturers still use proprietary or region-specific network management agents, such as transaction lanuage 1 (TL1) or signaling network managment protocol (SNMP).
There are various ways to accommodate these agents within a TMN framework. One is to use a mediation device or a Q-adapter. A Q-adapter simply takes a message from a management application and translates it so that an agent application can understand it. In turn, the Q-adapter translates alarms and reports from the agent back to the manager.
Another alternative is to use an adjunct processor for network management. This is almost always a UNIX box that sits between the manager and the device on the network and can manage the NE using a proprietary means while communicating to the manager via TMN. In this case, the adjunct processor hosts the TMN agents. Some equipment manufacturers create adjunct processors that can manage more than one rack of boards. But because the cost of a UNIX box compared to the cost of an RTOS is very high, this type of network management can be very expensive.
There are a few problems with using these methods. For one thing, the mediation device or adjunct processor can be a single point of failure for the network. If that device goes down, the manager cannot communicate with any of the network elements on the network. The use of a system other than TMN for network management also limits the amount and complexity of functions that can be performed. For example, there is no containment or filtering, which actually increases bandwidth used for network management communications.
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