scope:

On-going industry convergence and pressure to reduce cost is placing an ever-increasing emphasis on the need to rationalize and align various network management aspects across boundaries of standards/specifications producing organizations. The cost, resulting from integration and management challenges, of the lack of a coherent treatment of the whole network has becoming increasingly apparent to the point where operators of networks are demanding action.

This document provides key concepts and principles for the Federated Network Information Model covering all key aspects of a solution to the on-going industry convergence challenge. The proposal focuses on Information Model federation and is constructed to best deal with the various contradictory pressures of the current environment providing a pragmatic and realizable approach. The structure proposed will be called the Federated Network Information Model (FNIM).

The proposal set out in this document:

Explains:

- How, from a technical perspective, a number of standards and specifications generated by different organizations can function together to bring greater coherence to the management of converged networks and hence reduce operations costs.

- Specifically how TM Forum and 3GPP can work with each other and with other industry groups in a Standards Federation to develop a Federated Network Information Model drawing on insights from the broad community (including the TM Forum SID [7], TM Forum MTNM/MTOSI [8], 3GPP SA5 IRPs [14], DMTF CIM [15]).

- How the Federated Network Information Model can be used from a technical perspective (with the focus here being the Network Model).

Recognizes:

- The network is "always on", therefore changes in management solutions should not impact networks in operation.

- There will always be on-going change.

- That this is only a start on a very long journey.

Allows and enables:

- Decoupling of concerns across the industry whilst growing industry coherence.

- Differing delivery pace across the industry whilst aiming for industry convergence.

- Variety from innovation whilst removing unnecessary variety in management infrastructure.

- Temporary divergences and overlaps during the convergence process.

Ensures:

- Change is made only as a result of understanding of specific market needs.

- Progress by providing coherent solutions to satisfy the needs of all participating industry partners in order not to be blocked by the slowest laggard.

Highlights:

- The challenges of dealing with differing methodologies/tooling used across the standards arena and points out that methodology/tooling differences if ignored will significantly slow progress towards the target.

- The need for development of a new governance regime and points to some of the attributes of such a regime.

- An approach of gradual restructuring and a controlled converging coherence starting small and growing step by value-justified step.

- The challenge of presenting the models so all can have an identical understanding.

- The challenge of interpreting models from different origins, with their different terminology and viewpoints, to arrive at a shared understanding through a federated model. This leads to recognition of the need for a deeper uniform semantic analysis of the area covered by the umbrella information model (UIM) and the navigation points among concrete models which may further lead to the need for the development of information architectures and patterns.

This document focuses on the Information Model aspect of the problem as it is clear that the lack of an agreed-upon, coherent information model across organizational boundaries to support the FMC aspects of the industry that defines the things to be managed and the way they should be expressed is one of the first aspects that need to be tackled.