Next generation network management technology

Today’s telecommunications networks are becoming increasingly large, complex, mission critical and heterogeneous in several dimensions. For example, the underlying physical transmission facilities of a given network may be ‘‘mixed media’’ (copper, fiber‐optic, radio, and satellite); the subnetworks may be acquired from different vendors due to economic, performance, or general availability reasons; the information being transmitted over the network may be ‘‘multimedia’’ (video, data, voice, and images) and, finally, varying performance criteria may be imposed e.g., data transfer may require high throughput while the others, whose concern is voice communications, may require low call blocking probability. For these reasons, future telecommunications networks are expected to be highly complex in their services and operations. Due to this growing complexity and the disparity among management systems for individual sub‐networks, efficient network management systems have become critical to the current and futu...