define both the packets exchanged by the management protocol and the objects that are to be managed. Structure of management information (SMI): The SMI defines the rules for describing management information. The SMI is defined using ASN.1. Network management stations (NMSs): NMSs are usually engineering workstations. At least one NMS must be present in each managed environment. Parties: Newly defined in SNMPv2, a party is a logical SNMPv2 entity that can initiate or receive SNMPv2 communication. Management protocol: A management protocol is used to convey management information between agents and NMSs. SNMP is the Internet community's de facto standard management protocol. SNMP standards do not define which variables a managed system should offer. Rather, they use an extensible design, where the available information is defined by MIBs [58]. Telecommunication Networks MIBs describe the structure of the management data of a device subsystem and in its real nature, SNMP is simply a protocol for collecting and organizing information. This approach is coherent with the design of the Internet-based network, where all the network operations are automatically carried out by the control plane exploiting the rout- ers distributed intelligence and the main role of the centralized network management is to report the network status and statistics to the central control, to allow failed subsystems to be identified and substituted, and to monitor customers parameters like authentication, billing, and SO on. 3.3 Network Convergence over IP In Chapter 2, we have derived from the evolving market analysis a set of requirements for the telecommunication network, the first of which is the need of reducing the operational expenditure (OPEX). In order to reduce the OPEX, the number of different technologies used in the network has to be reduced SO that evolving toward convergence of all the services over the same network platform is a primary task for carriers. Convergence of network platforms also allows convergence of the network c