Telecom Management Architectures can vary greatly in scope and detail. The architecture for a large service provider, with a lot of existing legacy systems and applications, upon which many services are based, will be of high complexity. In contrast, the architectural needs of a start-up mobile operator providing its services to a small group of value-added Service Providers will be much less and will probably focus on more short-term needs. A mobile network operator has to manage many different types of networks as radio networks, exchanges, transmission networks, area networks, intelligent nodes and substantial amounts of computer hardware/software. This wide variety of network equipment will most probably be obtained from a variety of equipment vendors. The nature of a mobile radio network will be heterogeneous and will present a number of operational difficulties for the service provider on enabling effective and efficient network management. The standardisation work for the management of a PLMN has adopted the top-down approach and will from business needs identify functional and informational architectures. The physical architecture will have to meet these requirements and as there are many ways to build a PLMN it will vary greatly from one TMN solution to another. There will be many physical implementations, as different entities will take different roles in a PLMN. It is obvious that it will not be meaningful or even possible to fully standardise a common Telecom Management physical architecture for PLMNs. The present document will identify and standardise the most important and strategic contexts and serve as a framework to help define a physical architecture for a planned PLMN.

The management of a 3GPP system will put a lot of new requirements to the management systems compared to the second generation of Mobile telephony. Some of the challenging requirements affecting the physical architecture are:

• To be capable of managing equipment supplied by different vendors.
• To enable TM automation in a more cost efficient way - TM optimised for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
• To provide PLMN configuration capabilities that are flexible enough to allow rapid deployment of services.
• To report events and reactions in a common way in order to allow remote control.
• To allow interoperability between Network Operators/Service Providers for the exchange of management/charging information.
• To be scaleable and applicable to both larger and small deployments.
• Accessibility to information.
• To profit from advances and standards in IT and datacom industry.

The second generation of mobile networks can - from a management point of view - be characterised as the era of vendor-dependent NE managers. The different OSs had very low interoperability with other systems and functional blocks could rarely be re-used. The Mobile Telecom Management Networks were far away from the TMN vision where one vendor's OS should be able to manage other vendors' network elements. PLMN Organisations need cost-effective management solutions and better time to market focus. Interoperability, scalability and re-use are keywords for the new generation of management systems. Many of the new requirements on the management of PLMNs can only be solved by defining and establishing a suitable physical architecture. Though it is not possible to standardise on one single TM physical architecture, it is evidently so that the success of a Telecom Management Network of a PLMN Organisation will heavily depend on critical physical architectural issues. The present document will identify those architectural critical issues.