Maintenance Association / Service Instance

The administrator, while configuring Maintenance Domains, defines certain DSAPs (Domain Service Access Point) to be directly accessed by the customer. Configuring Maintenance End Point on the defined DSAPs with the same MAID and MD Level, established to verify the integrity of a single service instance is one Maintenance Association (MA).

Maintenance Association

The above figure displays one Maintenance Association at the Customer MD Level. Two MEPs are defined on bridge 1 and 6. The two MEPs together comprise one Maintenance Association.

MA is identified by a Short MA name that is unique in a maintenance domain. A MA is associated with more than one VLAN (Virtual LAN), but different MAs cannot share one VLAN in a single Maintenance Domain (MD).

For Example:

Example Maintenance Association

The above figure illustrates a service instance from the customer C1 point of view. The customer has four items of customer equipment attached to the four DSAPs 1-4, by which the operator connects the four DSAPs to create the service instances that are invisible to the customer.