Patent ID: 6253339
Filing Date: 2001-06-26
Classification: H04L,H04Q

Abstract:
A system for correlating alarms from a plurality of network elements (NEs) in a large communications network, said system comprising:a plurality of alarm reporters that report alarms from the NEs when faults are detected; andan alarm correlator that partitions the alarms into correlated alarm clusters such that alarms of one cluster have a high probability that they are caused by one network fault; said alarm correlator including:means for creating an alarm set by selecting an alarmed NE at the highest hierarchy level which is not tagged, finding all lower level NEs that are contained in the selected alarmed NE, finding all peer-related NEs for each alarmed lower level NEs and placing the highest level alarmed NE and all the found contained and peer-related NEs in the set; andmeans for creating additional alarm sets by repeating the steps for creating the alarm set for each alarmed NE in the network which is not tagged.