Intelligent Distributed Fault Management for Communication Networks

In this paper, we present an intelligent, distributed fault management system for communication networks using belief networks as fault model and inference engine. The managed network is divided into domains and for each domain, there is an intelligent agent called Domain Diagnostic Agent attached to it, which is responsible for this domain's fault management. Belief network models are embedded in such an agent and under symptoms observation, the posterior probabilities of each candidate fault node being faulty is computed. We de ne the notion of right diagnosis, describe the diagnosis process based on this concept, and present a strategy for generation of test sequence. KeywordsFault Diagnosis, Belief networks, Network Management, Fault Management, Sequential Decision Problem, Dynamic Programming