Maintenance Association (MA)

A maintenance association (MA) uniquely identifies a service within an MD. A service may be defined by an individual primary VLAN, and optionally by one or more VLANs associated with the primary VLAN, using a VLAN table configuration. There may be multiple MAs within a domain. Subsets of devices residing within the domain are collectively configured to form these associations. The devices belonging to a particular association will communicate among each other to implement the various features provided by CFM.

Maintenance Association Overview displays three maintenance associations configured for the customer equipment level 5 MD mdCE1. In this presentation, MD levels 0, 2, and 3 as shown in Maintenance Domain Overview are abstracted in the cloud. The presence of the non-customer equipment MDs in the cloud is transparent to the customer equipment MAs. Each network device on the edge of the cloud represents a CFM networking device configured for the appropriate MA that monitors the primary VLAN the device is on:

• VLAN 100 – MA: maCE1
• VLAN 200 – MA: maCE2
• VLAN 300 – MA: maCE3

For each monitored VLAN, each network device depicted resides at the edge of the MD for its physical location; for example it may be on a separate university or enterprise campus from the other nodes of the monitored service. Data from these nodes may or may not have to transit an ISP or other operator domains outside of the customer equipment administrator‘s control, before reaching the other end of the monitored VLAN.

Within MA configuration you specify the monitored service (VLAN), create a list of all MEPs that belong to the MA and optionally change the interval between the sending of CCMs.