Importance

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Abstract

Faults occurring in a telecommunications system are monitored identifying their time of onset and reporting them to an operator through an interface if they have not cleared within a predetermined interval. Transient faults, which do clear within that interval, are not reported directly, but only if such faults occur more frequently than a predetermined rate. This is determined by establishing a scan interval, and an analysis period equal to a plurality of scan intervals, monitoring the system continuously for the occurrences of faults, and storing their times of occurrence in a store. At the end of each scan interval, the number of occurrences of the fault during the analysis period which ends at the end of the scan interval are counted by a counter. If the number of occurrences of the fault in the analysis period is equal to or greater than a threshold value selected by user input, an alarm indicator is activated. This allows isolated transient faults to be disregarded, allowing the user to concentrate on recurrent intermittent faults.

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First Claim