Alarm model specification and dynamic multi-layer self-healing mechanisms for commercial and ad-hoc wireless networks

The wireless information era has created a phenomenal dependence amongst commercial and military applications on wireless networks. Such an increasing reliance in turn implies increasingly serious consequences caused by outages. Hence (i) alarm models that can help efficiently and quickly perform root cause analysis (RCA) and (ii) self-healing mechanisms that can respond to the dynamics of the underlying network and provide rapid recovery of the affected applications, are critical. We recognize the importance of the above and propose appropriate service survivability mechanisms. More specifically, our contributions are as follows. We derive alarm model specifications that can succinctly and accurately capture the network alarms and symptoms for processing by the inferencing (RCA) engine. Next, we propose a dynamic cost and performance-sensitive self-healing mechanism that can adapt to the networks´ dynamics and provide rapid and efficient self-healing. The proposed mechanism has the additional feature of being able to be specified in terms of policies, thereby allowing for an easy integration into the rapidly emerging policy-based management framework. The results of our work will benefit both network designers and managers and help (a) not only in increasing customer retention ratios, but also providing increased revenues in the commercial setting and (b) provide the critically needed quick and seamless restoration of military services.