Provisioning Transmission Paths Given Alarm Collecting Agents

For a reliable communication, all the alarms generated from a node should be delivered to a network management center. In general, before a management center receives alarms, they are collected through agents. It may be ideal for an agent to reside in every communication node, but it will use up the node's resource, such as processing power and communication bandwidth, as well as increase the cost of the node. When agents are deployed in a few selected nodes, however, there are chances that multiple fault may prohibit alarms from reaching the alarm collecting agents assuming the alarms travel along the provisioned path, as does usually in a WAN, such as in SDH/SONET. This paper investigates a way of finding the shortest path while a newly provisioned path does not cause multiple faults to block alarms basing on Bellman-Ford algorithm, and the proposed algorithm is proven mathematically.