A new fault detection method for computer networks

Over the past few years, fault detection for computer networks has attracted extensive attentions for its importance in network management. Most existing fault detection methods are based on active probing techniques which can detect the occurrence of faults fast and precisely. But these methods suffer from the limitation of traffic overhead, especially in large scale networks. To relieve traffic overhead induced by active probing based methods, a new fault detection method, whose key is to divide the detection process into multiple stages, is proposed in this paper. During each stage, only a small region of the network is detected by using a small set of probes. Meanwhile, it also ensures that the entire network can be covered after multiple detection stages. This method can guarantee that the traffic used by probes during each detection stage is small sufficiently so that the network can operate without severe disturbance from probes. Several simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.