End-to-end communications management using TMN "X" interfaces

The ongoing integration of LANs and WANs to support global communications and businesses and the emergence of integrated broadband communication services has created an increased demand for cooperation between customers, network and service providers to achieve end-to-end service management. Such a cooperation between autonomous authorities, each defining their own administrative management domains, requires the application of an open standardized framework to facilitate and regulate interworking. Such a framework is given by the ITU-T recommendations on "TMN", where the so-called "X" interface is of particular importance for inter-domain management. In this paper, we explain the role of the TMN "X" interface within an inter-domain TMN architecture supporting end-to-end communications management. We identify the important issues that need to be addressed for the definition and realization of TMN "X" interfaces and report about our practical experiences with the implementation of TMN "X" interfaces in the PREPARE project.