| Fault management deals with the detection, diagnosis and recovery of faults occurring in networks. The unreliable nature of wireless communication channels and the demand of mobile users for reliable connection motivates us to design a model to manage faults in wireless and mobile networks. Existing protocols for management of such networks are proprietary and perform poorly with regard to fault management. There is an acute need for standardized network management protocols in wireless networks, especially those that conserve bandwidth and minimize polling. In this work, we automate fault management in cellular networks as they are popular examples of wireless and mobile networks.; We first develop a taxonomy of faults and then generate a list of requirements that must be fulfilled by a satisfactory network management protocol. A distinction is made between core components and last-hop components in a cellular network. Core components are connected via wires while last-hop components are connected via wireless channels in today's cellular networks. Such networks are based on what we term the classical approach. We present an alternative approach in which both core components and last-hop components communicate exclusively through wireless channels. Such wireless-only networks, called w2w networks in our work, find wide applications in disaster and emergency situations and hence necessitate fault management.; Intelligent software agents and Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules are used in our design to automate the detection of faults, diagnosis of the causes and recovery from the faults occurring in classical cellular networks. Both stationary and mobile agents are used in order to conserve bandwidth, reduce polling and provide robustness in the case of abnormal disconnection in modern cellular networks. Simulation of different fault scenarios demonstrates the feasibility of our solution. We then address the additional faults that occur in w2w networks because of the exclusive wireless communication among all components. Our solution for automated fault management of classical cellular networks is extended to manage the additional faults in w2w networks. We finally show that our solutions fulfill the previously listed requirements of a satisfactory management protocol for cellular networks belonging to both the classical and wireless-only categories. |
