A new method of evaluating wired networks topology for fault diagnosis applications

This paper presents new techniques for locating and diagnosing faults on electric wires. There is a practical need to evaluate a cable´s health using the reflectometry method. The proposed fault location algorithm is based on the knowledge of the cable topology. The principle of the approach is to estimate the lengths of the segment in the cable by identifying them with measured pulses by the reflectometry techniques. Since the cable topology is a radial tree network, several possibilities of cable segments could be obtained with one measurement. A statistical algorithm has been developed to rank their possibilities by integrating the available information on the network. Finally, an example has demonstrated its efficiency for diagnosis needs.