Design of alarm management system in hybrid IP/optical networks

Network traffic demands grow explosively from multimedia, point-to-point, and E-Science applications. In order to meet such tremendous growth, Optical networks has been introduced for exploring higher bandwidth and better QoS guarantee. Problems arise when integrating the whole new optical infrastructure with current IP backbone, including controlling data path and network management. In this paper, we discuss the design issues of alarm management in hybrid networks containing DWDM, SDH and IP technologies. For instance, when there is a fiber cut in DWDM layer, tens of alarms would appear concurrently indicating network breakdowns in DWDM, SDH and IP layer separately, which will confuse network engineers for identifying fault location. Therefore, we propose a novel correlation method among these layers according to a pre-defined correlation diagram. Several test scenarios are experimented in out lab in order to illustrate the correlation diagram. Our contribution would benefit network carriers maintaining hybrid networks for root-cause finding among alarms cross different network layers.