Multidomain Diagnosis of End-to-End Service Failures in Hierarchically Routed Networks

Probabilistic inference was shown effective in the nondeterministic diagnosis of end-to-end service failures when applied in a centralized management system where the manager possesses a global knowledge of the system structure and state. Since many networks are organized into multiple administrative domains that may be unable to share configuration and state information, these centralized techniques are not applicable to them. This paper proposes a fault localization technique suitable for multidomain networks with hierarchical routing. The proposed technique divides the computational effort and system knowledge among multiple, hierarchically organized managers. Each manager performs fault localization in the domain it manages and requires only the knowledge of its own domain. We show through simulation that the proposed approach not only improves the feasibility of fault localization in multidomain networks, but also increases the effectiveness of probabilistic diagnosis and makes it realizable in networks of considerable size