Patent · US Expired

Alarm correlation in a large communications network

US6253339A · kind A · utility

90Cited by
13References
9Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateOct 28, 1998
Grant dateJun 26, 2001
Priority date
Expiry dateOct 28, 2018

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04Q2213/13349
  • WIPO fieldDigital communication
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A system and method of correlating alarms from a plurality of network elements (NEs) in a large communications network. A plurality of uncorrelated alarms are collected by an alarm collector from alarm reporters. An alarm correlator then partitions the alarms into correlated alarm clusters such that alarms of one cluster have a high probability that they are caused by one network fault. The partitioning of the alarms is performed by creating alarm sets, expanding the alarm sets into alarm domains, and merging the alarm domains into alarm clusters if predefined conditions are met. The sets are formed by selecting an alarmed NE at the highest network hierarchy level which is not tagged, finding all of its contained NEs, and finding NEs that are peer-related to those contained NEs that are in an alarmed state. The sets are expanded into domains by finding NEs that are not in an alarmed state which contain the highest level alarmed NE in each alarm set. The domains are merged into one alarm cluster if the two domains have at least one common NE, at least one of the common NEs is not tagged, and the majority of the NEs contained by the non-tagged common NE are in an alarmed state.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.