lding and implementation activities, both for decision making and design. Billing mediation or accounting management take care of the collection, buffering and delivering of information from the network elements or call control servers, either for billing or accounting purposes. Accounting management could be illustrated by means of an international call. If a Swedish subscriber calls a friend in the UK, the Swedish operator sends the bill and gets the full income. However, the call has also passed the network of the British operator, and it may even have been transited through networks belonging to other operators. The call income must then be shared among the operators involved. This is called accounting. How the money is shared is strictly defined by interconnection agreements. The accounting management takes cares of data collection in order to produce the call accounting and assist the income distribution among the different operators, either through accounting determination or checks. Configuration management and corrective measures are downstream functions, based on command execution. The previous functions were based on event collection. Configuration management plays a major role when trying to set the network behaviour. Examples are configuration of installed equipment, capacity extension on a path and network protection configuration. Configuration commands are issued to agents acting on the network elements, which are able to control the network behaviour. The control points in the network elements are called management control points. For ordinary voice-type networks configuration is performed by commands on the central processor to introduce routing tables, charging tables, end of selection cases, etc., often in order to support the call control function. This may be represented by management functions performed by management agents han- dling resources in the traffic plane and interconnected to it via management control points. The management actions are in this case ordered by centralized manageme