Simple packet aggregation technique for fault detection

The occurrence of a fault in the Internet is determined and recorded by a network fault management system. The symptom based packet aggregation technique using packet monitoring is employed for fault detection. The proposed technique is implemented using simple network management protocol (SNMP) based remote network monitoring (RMON) technology and experimented on a real backbone network. The aggregation model and the adaptive selection of the aggregation results proved to be effective in characterizing packets. It helps an administrator to decide whether the problem is between two hosts or on a special host. The packets employed are the ICMP packets, which belong to the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) suite.