A practical scheme for MPLS fault monitoring and alarm correlation in backbone networks

As current backbone network evolution involves replacing today’s multiple networks with a single global multi-protocol label switching (MPLS)-enabled backbone over an intelligent optical IP-based core network, fault management system (FMS) becomes critical for network service providers to monitor network health, performance, and to quickly identify and resolve operational problems.In this paper, we present a practical scheme for the fault management of MPLS-enabled backbone networks. First, we describe a hierarchical fault management architecture that scales well to large backbone networks. Then, we present an OAM tool, called MPLS Connectivity Monitor (CMON), to monitor MPLS operation and generate MPLS alarms. After that, we propose a hybrid technique to efficiently correlate MPLS alarms to other equipment and service alarms, including event aggregation, rule-based method, and codebook approach. Finally, we report our testing result obtained from a large-scale backbone network to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.