NFMi: an inner-domain network fault management system

Network fault management has been an active research area for a long period of time because of its complexity, and the returns it generates for service providers. However, most fault management systems are currently custom-developed for a particular domain. As communication service providers continuously add greater capabilities and sophistication to their systems in order to meet demands of a growing user population, these systems have to manage a multi-layered network along with its built-in legacy logical processing procedure. Stream processing has been receiving a lot of attention to deal with applications that generate large amounts of data in real-time at varying input rates and to compute functions over multiple streams, such as network fault management. In this paper, we propose an integrated inter-domain network fault management system for such a multi-layered network based on data stream and event processing techniques. We discuss various components in our system and how data stream processing techniques are used to build a flexible system for a sophisticated real-world application. We further identify a number of important issues related to data stream processing during the course of the discussion of our proposed system, which will further extend the boundaries of data stream processing.