The Design And Implementation Of South Bound Interface In Telecom Operating And Maintainance Center(OMC)

Operating and Maintainance Center (OMC) is responsible for Network Elements management in TMN architecture. Its functions include fault management ,configureation management ,performance management ,security management and OAM .And it also implements North Bound Interface for Network Management System. So it is the base of OSS system in telecom area。 The data collect interface of OMC ,which face to NE,we call it as South Bound Interface . For several decades development, network elements have provide many kinds of management interface, such as MML interface ,File Transfer interface ,SNMP,CMIP and CORBA.But as there is no universal access protocol and data model, it restricts the development of Network Management System。For several years practice on OMC design and implementation,we realied that if we want to make an OMC be a platform on NE management ,and can manage as many NE,the South Bound Interface must be unified,including unified data structure,unified communication and operation method.Using unified data structure can make the upper layer applicaton module to map the original NE data into OMC data model by simple mapping rules. By using unified communication and operation method can shieled the complexity of network commnunication and exchange protocol,make the OMC pays attention on business data processing.CORBA ,as a world leading middleware solution, provide interoperability among distributed objects.as it distributable, independent of hardware platforms, programming languages, and operating systems and use object oriented implement method, it has been used widely. Especially the North Bound Interface of 3G defined by China Unicom and China Mobile are also define by CORBA.By analysising the function of the North Bound Interface of OMC and the interfaces of managed elements,we decided to use CORBA as communication middleware , use Event Service of CORBA as application middleware ,and the interchange information is conveyed by event.data is constructed as name-value paire.Based on this design ,we implemented management of Alcatel's core network devices ,such as S1240 MSC ,A8330 HLR and spatial system.It satisfied the OMC requirement on functionality and performance.