Topology Discovery for Telecommunications-carrier Networks using Equipment Alarms

As for the service assurance operation of telecommunications carriers, accurate information about a network topology which indicates the connection relationships between pieces of network equipment is necessary. However, the network of a telecommunications carrier has several hundreds of thousands of equipment, and its topology is frequently supplemented and modified due to daily construction work and troubleshooting. It is a therefore a problem when incorrect topology information is mixed into the overall topology information. In this paper, we propose a method that can discover the topology between equipment by using alarm information issued by those equipment during construction work or when a failure occurs. The proposed method was evaluated using alarm information generated under in certain commercial configurations (sections containing specific routers), and it was confirmed that the current topology could be discovered with 100% accuracy, even though only 1.7% of the total topology was evaluated in one day.