In today’s cyber-world, network faults can not only cause unexpected damages and consternation to enterprises, but also result
in huge loss of customers and a lot of negative effects. For this reason, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) do their best
to achieve the goal of higher network reliability, service availability, and accessible bandwidth. To do so, most of them
construct or rent carrier-grade backbone networks, which use WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) with path restoration/protection
techniques, as one of the means toward the goal. However, network faults can still impact largely to these wellprotected WDM
networks since the actual network reliability would fall down as a fault occurs, even if the network could function as normal
with protection mechanisms. In addition, the protection/restoration mechanisms would usually get fault diagnosis into trouble
because they can cover faults in most cases. In this paper, a novel and competent fault diagnosis approach which can be used
in path-protected WDM mesh networks for a high and constant network availability is proposed. This diagnosis approach uses
the trimmed/extracted major alarm propagation behavior of a fault and our leader major alarm domain concept to deduce and
isolate the most suspicious network area of the fault. Additionally, to enhance the diagnosis accuracy, our approach also
refers to some certain information with respect to SRLG (Shared Risk Link Group) and dynamic network sessions of the diagnosed
network to further narrow down the suspicious area. Last, simulation results associated with discussions are shown to demonstrate
the performance of our diagnosis approach.
Keywords Network fault management - WDM mesh networks - SRLG - trimmed major alarm propagation pattern - leader major alarm domain