Properties of Network Faults

Network fault management is a difficult task due to the lack of accurate definitions for the different types of faults. In this work we attempt to characterize network faults by studying their effects on the statistics of network traffic. The evolution of networks in terms of size and variety of network components and services makes it difficult to understand the dynamics of the traffic. Instead, by describing network fault behavior in terms of the changes they effect on the statistics of network traffic, we can develop algorithms to detect or predict network faults. The advantage is the independence of fault descriptions from symptom specific feature vectors and the availability of historical data.