A distributed method and system of controlling a communications network
having spans of interconnected network elements that distribute network
topology information to respective span databases; advertise fault objects
to other network elements in a local span when the original fault affects
network elements; advertise alarm objects to other network elements that
are respectively associated with a circuit affected by the original fault;
and perform distributed processing of the advertised fault and alarm
objects with the other network elements and the respective span databases.
Other faults and alarms that may exist on the network are aggregated.
Causality may be determined by correlating other faults and alarms with
the received fault. Sympathetic faults are suppressed while root cause
faults are promoted to an alarm and reported to affected network elements.
The number of alarms viewed by a network manager are reduced by performing
such distributed alarm correlation and fault reporting suppression.
