article

Characterization of failures in an operational IP backbone network

Authors:

Athina Markopoulou,

Gianluca Iannaccone,

Supratik Bhattacharyya,

Chen-Nee Chuah,

Yashar Ganjali,

Christophe DiotAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), Volume 16, Issue 4

Pages 749 - 762

https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2007.902727

Published: 01 August 2008 Publication History

Abstract

As the Internet evolves into a ubiquitous communication infrastructure and supports increasingly important services, its dependability in the presence of various failures becomes critical. In this paper, we analyze IS-IS routing updates fromthe Sprint IP backbone network to characterize failures that affect IP connectivity. Failures are first classified based on patterns observed at the IP-layer; in some cases, it is possible to further infer their probable causes, such as maintenance activities, router-related and optical layer problems. Key temporal and spatial characteristics of each class are analyzed and, when appropriate, parameterized using well-known distributions. Our results indicate that 20% of all failures happen during a period of scheduled maintenance activities. Of the unplanned failures, almost 30% are shared by multiple links and are most likely due to router-related and optical equipment-related problems, respectively, while 70% affect a single link at a time. Our classification of failures reveals the nature and extent of failures in the Sprint IP backbone. Furthermore, our characterization of the different classes provides a probabilistic failure model, which can be used to generate realistic failure scenarios, as input to various network design and traffic engineering problems.

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Characterization of failures in an operational IP backbone network

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cover image IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking Volume 16, Issue 4

August 2008

249 pages

ISSN:1063-6692

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 01 August 2008

Revised: 13 September 2006

Received: 15 July 2004

Published in TON Volume 16, Issue 4

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