gardless of whether Cisco, Nortel, Siemens or any other company is chosen for the physical hardware. Otherwise, different hardware requires a different OSS and installing new hardware from different vendors leads to a patchwork of OSSes. Vendor independence can be achieved by getting hardware vendors to implement a common protocol through which OSS software can talk to the hardware just as all computers on the web can talk to each other because they all use TCP/IP. A protocol has been proposed to achieve vendor independence in managing ATM switches, called the General Switch Management Protocol (GSMP). Vendor independ- ence is achieved when functionalities provided by some technology are provided by equipment regardless who supplies that equipment. However, GSMP is limited in scope to a small set of the capabilities of ATM switches. Distributed approaches, such as Common Object Result Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Telecommunication Information Networking Architecture (TINA), also seek to remedy the problem of heterogeneity technology implementations by different vendors. 3.2 ATM Configuration Management ATM has virtual paths (VPs) for telecom network traffic. VPs are decoupled from physical transmission paths and physical interfaces. ATM has a double-multiplexing structure which allows virtual trunk routes to be created at the VP layer of an ATM network. These VP routes can carry traffic in the virtual channel (VC) layer from dif- ferent end-users. Indeed, many thousands of VCs can be multiplexed on to any VP. The physical and virtual layers of ATM can be mapped on to a functional archi- tecture with: trail termination functions within layers that are independent of payload functions between layers that are also independent of payload. A single link of an ATM virtual connection is called a "connection". A virtual path connection (VPC) comprises many virtual path links (VPLs) con- nected end-to-end. Each VPL may run over any of a variety of technologies, such as 3 ATM Network Management - The ATM Forum Model Tab