A 3GPP system is composed of a multitude of Network Elements (NE) of various types and, typically, different vendors, which inter-operate in a co-ordinated manner in order to satisfy the network users' communication requirements. The occurrence of failures in a NE may cause a deterioration of this NE's function and/or service quality and will, in severe cases, lead to the complete unavailability of the respective NE. In order to minimize the effects of such failures on the Quality of Service (QoS) as perceived by the network users it is necessary to:

• detect failures in the network as soon as they occur and alert the operating personnel as fast as possible;
• isolate the failures (autonomously or through operator intervention), i.e. switch off faulty units and, if applicable, limit the effect of the failure as much as possible by reconfiguration of the faulty NE/adjacent NEs;
• if necessary, determine the cause of the failure using diagnosis and test routines; and,
• repair/eliminate failures in due time through the application of maintenance procedures.

This aspect of the management environment is termed "Fault Management" (FM). The purpose of FM is to detect failures as soon as they occur and to limit their effects on the network Quality of Service (QoS) as far as possible. The latter is achieved by bringing additional/redundant equipment into operation, reconfiguring existing equipment/NEs, or by repairing/eliminating the cause of the failure. Fault Management (FM) encompasses all of the above functionalities except commissioning/ decommissioning of NEs and potential operator triggered reconfiguration (these are a matter of Configuration Management (CM)). FM also includes associated features in the Operations System (OS), such as the administration of a pending alarms list, the presentation of operational state information of physical and logical devices/resources/functions, and the provision and analysis of the alarm and state history of the network. This TS specifies the overall requirements for 3G Fault Management (FM) as it applies to the Network Elements (NE), Element Manger (EM) and Network Manager (NM).