notifications, and SO on. The C-SAP is used for more time sensitive control plane primitives that support handovers, radio resources management, AAA server signaling, and SO on. 9 An IEEE 802.16 entity is defined as the logical entity in an SS/MS or BS that comprises the PHY and MAC layers of the Data Plane and the Management/Control Plane. Next Generation Mobile Communications Ecosystem 8.3.8 Open Source Software In this section we will very briefly touch upon Open Source Software which is a growing global trend. There are over 100 open source projects and products for OSS. The network-oriented prod- ucts are typically related to IP networks and not to traditional telecommunication networks. In addi- tion, many of the products support both network and IT (systems) management. Some known open source solutions which are also suitable for the telecom industry in general are Nagios, OpenNMS, OTRS, Zenoss, and Zip Tie. All these solutions are released under the GNU General Public License agreement: Nagois is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring application software. It can monitor SNMP, ICMP, and SO on, services and can also conduct remote monitoring. Nagios was originally designed to run under Linux, but also runs well on other Unix variants. OpenNMS is an enterprise-grade network monitoring platform developed under the open source software model. It consists of a community-supported, open-source project as well as an organization offering commercial services, training and support. It is mainly written in Java and it can theoretically run on any system that supports a 1.5 software development kit. OTRS (Open-source Ticket Request System) is an open-source and free issue tracking system software package which the telecom industry can use to assign tickets to incoming queries, thereby improving the handling of support requests and other customer traffic. OTRS has been implemented in the programming language Perl. Zenoss is an open source application, server and network management platform based