 technologies will provide a unified management process. The result will afford a consolidated view of alarm surveillance; performance and configuration access to all related nodes of the integrated domain. The sub-domains include but are not limited to: GMS/GPRS and UMTS Sub-domains - incorporating radio access, packet and cir- cuit switching network elements. The Transport system - has to do primarily with the core transport network incor- porating, e.g. a SDH backbone, a set of microwave links, and overlay ATM/IP network running on the SDH ring. The multi-vendor environment set up stands to support NE from different vendors, which will continue as part of a common element to 2G/3G or evolve through up- grade from 2G to 3G. The setup may incorporate LAN or IP, VAS, and fault report or monitoring NEs. Resource and Network Management 8.3.4 Main 3G Network Elements for Management In the following, we describe the components of the network element layer illustrated in Figure 8.4. We start by outlining the elements corresponding to the radio access net- work. However, because our interest lies primarily with the 3G elements, we describe mainly the elements corresponding to the UTRAN. 8.3.4.1 The UTRAN Building Blocks The main components of UTRAN (illustrated in Figure 8.5), which would be managed by the integrated management system proposed in the preceding section include: 3G Base Stations (BS, in 3GPP called Node B) Site solution products, e.g. antennas and Power systems Radio Network Controllers (RNC) UTRAN Functions (Software for RNC and BS) Radio Access Network management Network Management System CN Management Unit Core Network (CN) RAN Management Unit Radio Network Controller (RNC) 3G Base Station (BS) RADIO ACCESS NETWORK (RAN) User Equipment (Ue) Figure 8.5 Essential UTRAN network elements. Briefly reviewing from Chapter 3, the RNC takes care of the radio access bearers for user data, the radio network and mobility. The 3G BS provides the radio resources. The main interfaces are: Iu interface between RNC an