Implementing OSI agent/managers for TMN

The telecommunications management network (TMN) architecture defines a framework for the management of telecommunications networks and services. It is based on a set of TMN standards developed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T), and is finding increased interest in the telecommunications industry, where rapid development of services and open architectures are in demand. Open systems interconnection (OSI) agent/managers as defined by the OSI systems management standards play a major role in the TMN architecture. However, the complexity of these standards make the implementation of agent/managers and thus TMN systems a challenging task; methodologies and tools to ease the task of building agent/managers are needed. This article discusses the key difficulties in building OSI agent/managers and presents an architecture and a toolkit that can overcome them. The toolkit automates the generation of code that conforms to TMN and OSI standards, allowing the implementor to focus on the implementation of agent and manager specific components using the facilities provided by the toolkit.