Using Web Services in TMN Environment

One great challenge that equipment vendors, service providers and network operators confront is how to manage and integrate the complicated telecommunication hardware, software and services in an efficient manner. The integration of TMN and CORBA has been put forward as a solution. But when disparate service providers are distributed in an Internet scale, IIOP packages can hardly traverse firewalls. Web Services, on the contrary, generally use HTTP or SMTP that is allowed by most firewalls. Hence, it’s valid to consider the use of Web Services. This paper introduces an architecture, which uses Web Services in TMN environment and thus allows different service providers to interoperate in a flexible and convenient way. Besides, software vendors and customers could also benefit from this architecture. Implementation details and a prototype system are also given in this paper.