Figure SO.32 TIP Service Management - Service Characteristics

The ServiceSpecCharacteristic and the associated ServiceSpecCharacteristicValues pairs are used in both the Service Definition and the Service Template to describe, or characterize, a Service. The CharacteristicSpecification and the CharacteristicSpecValues pairs are used to characterize the Service Access Point through the association of the SapSpecification with the EntitySpecCharUse.  These provide the actual characteristic / values pairs that would be found, for example, in a Bandwidth Profile Specification for an Ethernet Service User Network Interface (UNI) or Ethernet Virtual Connection (EVC) endpoint. The Bandwidth Profile Specification would contain the following characteristics: committed information rate (CIR), committed burst size (CBS), excess information rate (EIR), excess burst size (size), and possibly color marking (CM) and color forwarding (CF) indicators. By defining this specification, including the associated characteristic values, as an independent entity, the specification could be associated to a Sap or an EVC.<br/>