Data-driven fault management for TINA applications

This paper describes the effectiveness of stream-oriented data-driven scheme for achieving autonomous fault management of hyper-distributed systems such as networks based on the Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA). TINA, whose specifications are in the finalizing phase within TINA-Consortium, is aiming at achieving interoperability and reusability of telecom applications software and independent of underlying technologies. However, to actually implement TINA network, it is essential to consider the technology constraints. Especially autonomous fault management at run-time is crucial for distributed network environment because centralized control using global information is very difficult. So far many works have been done on so-called off-line management but runtime management of service failure seems immature. This paper proposes introduction of stream-oriented data-driven processors to the autonomous fault management at runtime in TINA based distributed network environment. It examines the features of distributed network applications and technology requirements to achieve fault management of those distributed applications such as effective multi-processing of surveillance, testing, reconfiguration in addition to ordinary processing. It shows basic features of stream-oriented data-driven processors which performs effective multi-processing without any overhead, overload tolerance, and passive nature giving less side-effects to the environment based on dynamic data-driven scheme which is realized as autonomous elastic pipelines on VLSIs. Effectiveness of the features is demonstrated through some preliminary experiments. The feature is suitable for runtime management. Then, it is proposed to apply the processor to the fault management of TINA environment and is shown that the stream-oriented data-driven processor can achieve effective fault management capability such as surveillance, fault detection, and isolation without any overhead.