Issues in the Integration of IN and TMN

Over recent years, the need to introduce rapidly new telecommunications services has led to the development of the Intelligent Network (IN). These services and the increasingly complex supporting network infrastructure need to be managed. The Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) provides the framework for their management. Now, it is becoming clear that future sophisticated services, diverging from the simple telephony call model, will need to be deployed, operated and managed in an integrated fashion. Target, long term architectures such as TINA are being developed to support these services. This paper considers the issues behind the co-existence of IN and TMN, contrasts their philosophies and architectures and explains the nature of operation in the control and management planes. It considers the use of the TMN to manage or even replace the IN and discusses issues for their integration in a unifying target framework such as TINA. The role of the supporting technologies is also examined.