Overlay Fault Diagnosis Based on Evidential Reasoning

The attractive characteristics of overlay networks bring to overlay fault diagnosis new challenges, which include inaccessible underlying network information, incomplete and inaccurate network status observations, dynamic symptom-fault causality relationship, and multi-layer complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel evidential reasoning based overlay fault diagnosis technique called ERD. Firstly, by analyzing end-user observed network symptoms, ERD narrows down suspicious components, and investigates their status (i.e., good or bad) with likelihood measurement and uncertainty evaluation using a novel evidence-driven belief function. Next, ERD adapts to the changes in highly dynamic overlay networks by dynamically constructing plausible fault diagnosis graph based on belief evaluation. Finally, ERD conducts plausible fault reasoning to locate the root causes of observed network symptoms.