On-going industry convergence and pressure to reduce cost is placing 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 is becoming increasingly apparent to the point where operators of networks are demanding action. To drive for action the operators are developing requirements that articulate aspects of the problem to be tackled. In addition ISV and equipment vendors are also developing requirements. The intention from these two activities is to develop a consistent and complete set of requirements to cover the problem space. Analysis of these requirements led to the identification of a number of use cases that highlight detailed examples of the problems and enable solutions to these problems to be explored (noting that during the process described here the use cases were confirmed appropriate valuable cases to cover). It is intended that through these on-going explorations:

• Specific relationships between 3GPP model elements and TM Forum model elements can be identified
• Overlaps of the 3GPP and TM Forum models can be highlighted
• Gaps in modelling, where neither 3GPP nor TM Forum provide suitable capability, can be plugged

This document:

• Captures the use cases considered explaining them in the context of:
  • The requirements and scenarios that occur as a result of FMC
  • Real application needs described in terms of an operator activity context
• Develops the use cases to the form of detailed scenarios
  • Explaining a stylised network diagram
  • Homing in on the critical area of interaction
• Provides pictorial forms for the model interaction
  • Showing the essence of the model relationships
  • Offering a familiar and penetrable form
• Provides detailed formal views of the model interactions
  • These are in UML form
• Offers a specific solution
  • Resulting from an evaluation of various proposals not captured in the document
• Uses the use cases and requirements to validate the recommendation
• Provides views of the interrelationship between models to achieve the support for the solution in 3GPP and TM Forum

The work covered by this document was carried out as part of the Umbrella model activity [2], as there is interplay between these two areas. Both activities drew from and fed into each other. Through the progression described above there was close and appropriate engagement of operator as well as the wider 3GPP and TM Forum community. This involved engagement in the process of:

• Choosing the cases for analysis with focus on the relationship to operator requirements
• Confirming the appropriateness of the detailed scenarios especially in the context of the pictorial form of the model interactions
• Validating the solution proposals at both a high level and a detailed level especially in the context of the solution phasing

This led to focus on areas of the model for intense alignment and to the development of mechanisms for model interrelationship. The proposal set out in this document supports the Objectives set out in [1]. This document proposes some specific structure of model and realisation of that structure across 3GPP and TM Forum. The proposal takes advantage of the TM Forum Information Framework (SID) [3] and the TM Forum Integration Framework (MTNM/MTOSI) [4] and 3GPP SA5 group work [5] (NRM IRPs etc.). The proposal provides an initial pragmatic solution for reduction in cost of integration and improvement of degree of integration for the purpose of End-to-End management for a specific aspect of the problem.

This document sets out a number of independent operator activity contexts where each context has been chosen to exercise one or more of the operator requirements and to lead to points of intersection of the network model work of 3GPP and TM Forum where some degree of harmonisation would consequently seem valuable. Each context description focuses on one or more use cases that suitably describe the relevant details of that operator activity with respect to an expected area of intersection. The use cases are first explained and then depicted via one or more stylized network and model diagrams. The model diagram is then developed to a formal model structure. Finally the set of changes proposed cumulated from all context analyses are provided as a coherent recommendation. Respective concrete models must use this model to support the FMC use cases to claim FMC network management compliance. It should be noted that the UIM cannot be used directly for implementation. Implementation classes must be derived from those in the UIM by Inheritance or some other appropriate mechanism. Classes derived from those in the UIM (e.g. for the fixed environment) must use different names from those used in the UIM. This content of this document has been jointly developed by 3GPP and TM Forum as part of the Joint Working Group on Resource Model Alignment [11].