Topology Discovery Method using Network Equipment Alarms

Abstract

For the service assurance operation of telecommunications carriers, accurate information about a network topology that indicates the connection relationships between pieces of network equipment is necessary. However, the network of a telecommunications carrier has several hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment. Furthermore, its topology is frequently supplemented and modified due to daily construction work and troubleshooting. As a result, this causes incorrect topology information to be mixed into the overall topology information. In this paper, we propose a method that can discover the topology between equipment by using alarm information issued by those equipment during construction work or when a failure occurs. The proposed method was evaluated using alarm information generated on a commercial network. The experimental results show that the proposed method discovers topology with higher accuracy than classical topology discovery approaches.