Method for visualizing information from large-scale carrier networks

With the increase in services, such as telephone, video on demand, and internet connection, networks now consist of various elements, such as routers, switches, and a wide variety of servers. The structure of a network has become more complicated. Therefore, failuare diagnosis and the affected area by using many alarms tends to be more difficult and the time required detecting the causal point of failure also becomes longer. However, to improve quality of services, reducing diagnosis time is essential. Alarm browsers and graphs are used to display the collected data from a network to determine the network's status. An operator manages a network by envisioning the network structure. However, the larger the network becomes, the more difficult it is for operators to do this. Therefore, a topology view with geographical information and a topology view with hierarchical information of equipment are used. However, these views degrade if the scale of the network is even larger and more complex. We propose a method for visualizing network information on space and time axes. This method can support network operators to recognize causal points of failure and affected areas. We also explain a prototype software implementation of this visualization method.