An Automated System for Analyzing Impact of Faults in IP Telephony Networks

The widespread use of IP telephony (IPT) has introduced corresponding management issues related to the diagnosis and impact analysis of faults in the IPT network. There are complex logical relationships between the various elements present in the IPT network ranging from call processing engines, PSTN voice gateways, and conferencing and voice mail servers, to endpoints like IP-based handsets. Without an understanding of these complex relationships, traditional element-oriented network fault-management applications are inadequate to assess IPT service impact in the presence of a network or system fault. In this paper, we present a proposal for determining the root cause and assessing the impact of a fault in an IPT network on voice services and end users by automatically executing a series of diagnostic tests from various probe points in the network, and correlating the resulting information with the faults reported from the network. We use a CIM-based model of the IPT network to aid the diagnostic and impact assessment process