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network there is a certain degree of overlap between
cells so the scope of the failure reported by SICAEN
is lessened using this overlap information.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
A complete description of the SICAEN method has
been presented in the previous sections. Stages SI
and C provide a normalised annotated input to the
Aggregation phase. These first two stages make a
heavy use of the facilities provided by the
underlying OSS and corporate repositories to obtain
normalised Service-Specific Potential Incidents,
taking into account not only network faults, but also
operator actions. The later are not usually analyzed
by other methods since its root cause is already
known, but nevertheless they create a measurable
Service Impact to the user.
The Aggregation stage computes, using
topological and functional relationships among the
network elements, the net effect for each Service
Specific Potential Incidence (S-SPI). The last two
stages, E and N, provide the means to reduce the
volume of information generated by the Aggregation
stage and to relay the information to external clients.
SICAEN method has proven to be a powerful
tool to determine the impact of severe network faults
on mobile basic services in the context of
Telefonica’s IMPACTA project, which is used to
provide automated reports, textual and graphical, on
severe network failures as requested by the Spanish
Law (Real Decreto 424/2005). Nevertheless, some
enhancements have been identified during its daily
use.
The first enhancement regards the ability to
disaggregate a long life Service Incident into several
separate Service Incidents when it is suspected to
have been wrongly aggregated. In this situation, a
re-evaluation of correlation criteria for every
concerned Service-Specific Potential Incident (S-
SPI) should be performed.
Another enhancement concerns the use of
network resource partial unavailability information
as input. A network resource may be only partially
affected by a fault and, as a result, it may be only
able to preserve part of the services it usually
supports operating under regular conditions.
Additionally, the effect of the fault over each
individual service may vary meaningfully. To handle
this kind of partial unavailability information the use
of fuzzy logic and fuzzy reasoning techniques
(Zadeh, 1988 and Baldwin, 1981)) shall be explored.
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