tions defined in the mpCP, i.e., the "management protocol" (see Sect. 5.3.4). 5.3.2 Managed Objects in mpCP Issues related to MO specifications are: How to classify and identify MOs, considering the problem of managing the development and maintenance of a large set of MOs. How to describe MOs. How to manage MOs (create, maintain, store and distribute MOs to, e.g., AFs). The number of MOs for an operator network becomes very large, considering all the strata, layers and resources that have to be managed. For managing the TCP/IP connectivity plane alone, some 180 MOs are presently designed. Classification of MOs is therefore needed. In general, this can be done according to the following criteria: The actual network system. Logical networks, if defined. The functional structure of the network system. The basic classification may reflect the interlayer structure of the network, possibly described over several network levels. The MOs can then be further aggregated according to a possible interstrata structure. Considering that an MO that is specified for a particular resource may be usable for a whole class of resource implementations, and that MOs are specified by many suppliers of traffic network products, a global identification of MOs is very valua- ble for building a management system. A suitable identification system is then the global object identifier system that we already mentioned. This system is part of the ASN. 1 standard. It defines such identifiers in a classification tree that can com- prise all standardization bodies as well as any supplier who produces ASN.1-based specifications. 4 Both TMN-MOs and SNMP-MOs are identified by the ASN.1 data type OBJECT IDENTIFIERs. SNMP also use object identifiers to identify their interlayer structure for the TCP/IP connectivity stratum (presently consisting of the IP, ICMP, TCP, UDP, and EGP layers). 5.3 The Management Plane Control Point (mpCP) A common approach to network management requires that all network systems specify their MOs in the same way. Since an MO 