The E-UTRAN and EPC systems need to be managed. As E-UTRAN and EPC are evolvements of UMTS, the management should also evolve from UMTS. A reuse of the existing UMTS management standard solutions will have the following benefits:

• It is proven in operation;
• It will minimise both the standardisation and product development efforts (i.e. the cost and time);
• It provides a base for on which more functionality can be developed (compared with making everything new from the start);
• It will shorten the time to market for E-UTRAN and EPC systems;
• It will facilitate a seamless coexistence with UMTS management systems.

The complexity of the E-UTRAN/ EPC network will also place new demands on the Operations and Maintenance of the Network, therefore as well as re-using and evolving existing Management solutions, Management solutions for E-UTRAN/ EPC will also need to encompass some new functionality (e.g. Auto-Configuration, Auto-Optimisation, Information Model Discovery, and development of P2P Interfaces) Functionality shall be supported by clear use cases or other documented justification. Best Practice in O&M has changed dramatically in recent years. This has been driven both by changes in the networks being managed and also by the increase in the number and complexity of services being supported on those networks. The emphasis has changed from infrastructure management to the management of services supported on that infrastructure. There is less focus on having all management applications at the EMS layer and greater emphasis on interfaces and data availability such that the NMS and OSS layer have access to the required data. The concept of Next Generation Networks decouples the supported services from the underlying access network. It was easier in the days of voice based services to assume that by managing the infrastructure the services were also managed. The multitude and complexity of today's services means that this is no longer the case. Element Management is about managing a single domain from a single vendor. It no longer makes sense to do any significant analysis at this level since there is a strong interdependency between domains and vendors to assure end to end quality of service. It still makes sense to support some vendor/domain specific applications at this level, but the emphasis is on support of standardized interfaces that make the element management data available to the NMS and OSS. An increased emphasis on O&M related standards is pivotal in enabling analysis applications at the NMS and OSS level. This makes it possible to do end to end analysis in the context of services rather than just RAN specific or Core specific analysis for a given vendors equipment node. The E-UTRAN/ EPC networks will increase the numbers of NE's to be managed, while at the same time having strong requirements (ref [3]) that emphasise the need to reduce network complexity and lower operating costs.

The present document intends to study the reuse of UMTS management for E-UTRAN and EPC to decide on which parts shall be reused without any change, which parts shall be changed and which existing parts cannot be reused at all and make recommendations about that. It also intends to recommend management principles for E-UTRAN and EPC.