The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Nov. 23, 1999
Filed:
Nov. 26, 1996
William D Croslin, Colorado Springs, CO (US);
MCI Communications Corporation, Washington, DC (US);
Abstract
A method and apparatus for analyzing a telecommunications network and isolating failures within the network first receives alarms from various nodes in the network as a result of a failure. The method selects one alarm and then retrieves topology data associated with a trunk that caused the selected alarm to be generated. The method collects all alarms from the nodes traversed by the selected trunk and applies the collected alarms to the retrieved topology. The method identifies or retrieves information corresponding to maximum failure spans that can be restored with a single restoration route (failure spans) for the selected trunk. Thereafter, the method applies the selected alarms to the corresponding failure spans to identify the single failure span containing the failure to thereby isolate the failure. By isolating a failure to within a failure span, the present invention locates a failure with precision sufficient for determining an optimal restoral route, but minimized within a sufficient range of spans in the network so that processing time for isolating the failure is minimized. As a result, the identified failure span represents the isolation of the failure, and is the most granular isolation of a failure useful for restoring traffic impacted by the failure.