SICAEN: a new method to determine the impact of severe network faults on basic telecommunication services

Abstract

Despite the effort that has been carried out in the last two decades, there is still a huge gap between the information that network management systems can provide to identify and solve network problems, and the information they offer to determine the actual impact of these problems on basic telecommunication services. This paper presents a new method (called SICAEN) to identify and characterize service impact incidents using network resource unavailability information as an input. Most of the previously done work tries to identify the root cause of a failure, while SICAEN is concerned with the actual impact of the failure, from a user (service) perspective. The method performs impact evaluation in a per-service basis and has been successfully applied in real world in the context of Telefonica’s IMPACTA project, whose goal is to determine the impact of severe network faults on mobile basic services for the Spanish biggest mobile operator.