A LAN fault diagnosis system

The increasing importance of computer networks in today's society demands high levels of network availability and reliability. This is particularly apparent for the enterprises that perform their transactions depending highly on e-commerce. However, a trivial network fault could cause costly damages to the enterprises because of fault propagation. In this paper, we offer a fault diagnosis mechanism for effective and automated network fault isolation. This mechanism uses finite state machine (FSM) to model our classified and refined fault propagation behavior. A concept called fault propagation duration is also introduced into the mechanism and combined with the FSM-based fault propagation knowledge to complete the mechanism's implementation. Based on the diagnosis mechanism, an automated fault diagnosis system called alarm correlation view (or ACView) for isolating network faults is proposed. This diagnosis system not only provides the process of automated alarm collection, alarm correlation, and fault isolation, but also functions to recognize the propagations of all the faults with their corresponding fault severities. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.