A new probing scheme for fault detection and identification

Probing technology has been used as a fault detection and identification method in computer networks and successful applications have been reported. One of the most appealing features of probing-based schemes is that it is an active approach. A set of probes can be sent on a periodic basis. If a network failure is detected, the outcomes of these probes are further analyzed to determine the root cause of the problem. However, the availability of a large set of such probes may in fact place a huge burden on management systems in terms of extra management traffic and storage space. Hence, the need of minimizing such a probing set has become highly desirable. In this work, we propose a preplanned probe selection scheme, in which a small set of probes are chosen such that it maintains the diagnostic power of the original set. The new approach is based on the constraint satisfaction problem paradigm and its powerful search techniques are exploited. The efficiency of the new algorithm has been demonstrated by the results reported.