Importance

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Abstract

A method and apparatus for analyzing a telecommunications network and isolating failures within the network first analyzes the network to identify all non-terminating paths between two digital cross-connect (DXC) nodes and terminating paths that extend from one DXC node but terminate before reaching another DXC node. All non-terminating paths are assigned 'failure spans' or maximum spans that can be restored with a single restoration route. All terminating paths that correspond to end nodes of the non-terminating path are selected, where each terminating path has a path identifier preferably indicating the inter-node connections of the path. The path identifier is compared to each failure span to create a table of correlations. A similar process is performed for all terminating paths that do not correspond to non-terminating paths in the network. When a failure occurs, all paths are identified for each corresponding alarm and compared to the previously constructed table. A failure span is identified as including a failure if one or more paths are on the failure span and are in alarm, and all paths which are off the failure span are not in alarm. Furthermore, the ports on each path in alarm can be collected to determine whether the network suffers from a full or a partial outage.

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First Claim