Mechanism for fault diagnosis and recovery of network service chains

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-10536347-B2
Application number	US-201715619067-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jun 9, 2017
Priority date	Jun 9, 2017
Publication date	Jan 14, 2020
Grant date	Jan 14, 2020

Abstract

A computer-implemented method is provided for fault diagnostics and recovery of network service chains. The method includes discovering, by a processor, a network graph representative of components of the network service chains. The method further includes identifying, by the processor, intersecting ones of the components of the network service chains in the network graph. The method also includes repairing, by the processor, one or more of the components of at least one of the network service chains based on a component repair sequence that maintains service continuity of the network service chains and that is determined based on a commonality.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A computer-implemented method for fault diagnostics and recovery of network service chains, comprising:
discovering, by a processor, a network graph representative of components of the network service chains;
identifying, by the processor, intersecting ones of the components of the network service chains in the network graph indicative of a commonality therebetween; and
selectively repairing, by the processor, one or more of the components of at least one of the network service chains up to an entirety thereof based on a component repair sequence that maintains service continuity of the network service chains and that is determined and selectively reordered based on the commonality,
wherein the network graph comprises a plurality of graphs, each (i) comprising one or more Virtualized Network Functions, and (ii) corresponding to a respective one of the network service chains.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , further comprising controlling Virtual Network Function dependencies of Virtual Network Functions in the network graph.

3. The computer-implement method of claim 1 , further comprising identifying a failure in the network service chains by monitoring a status of the components of the network service chains.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3 , wherein the failure is identified based on one or more metrics selected from the group consisting of a Key Performance Indicator, a latency, a jitter, a throughput, a packet loss, a component usage, a component availability, a component size, and an energy consumption.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 3 , wherein the failure is identified based on one or more failure types selected from the group consisting of a physical resource failure, a virtual resource failure, a Virtual Machine failure, an application level failure, a processor failure, a memory failure, a Network Interface Card failure, a disk crash, and an operating system crash.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the component repair sequence is determined further based on one or more application requirements of an application relating to the at least one of the network service chains.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the component repair sequence is determined further based on end-to-end network service requirements.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein said repairing step comprises performing a repair action selected from the group consisting of instantiating a new Virtual Machine based on one or more policies, restoring one or more network functions, adjusting one or more network function configuration parameters, adjusting one or more network function links, and pointing one or more of the components to one or more alternate ones of the intersecting components.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , further comprising updating the network graph based on any repair actions performed in said repairing step.

10. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein said repairing step determines a particular repair operation to perform from a set of potential repair operations based on one or more predetermined policies for the network service chains.

11. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the commonality comprises at least one of the intersecting ones of the components of the network service chains in the network graph.

12. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the at least one of the network service chains comprises N components, wherein N is an integer greater than two, and wherein said repairing step selectively replaces 1 up to N of the N components depending upon an identified failure.

13. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , further comprising correlating network service chain requirements for all of the network service chains to network resources to determine the component repair sequence of the at least one of the network service chains.

14. The computer-implemented method of claim 13 , wherein said correlating step uses machine learning and heuristics to determine the component repair sequence of the at least one of the network service chains.

Assignees

• IBM

Inventors

• Calo Seraphin B
• Freimuth Douglas M
• Le Thai Franck
• Makaya Christian
• Nahum Erich

Classifications

• H04L41/5058

  Service discovery by the service manager · CPC title

• G06F2009/45595

  Network integration; Enabling network access in virtual machine instances · CPC title

• H04L41/5025

  by proactively reacting to service quality change, e.g. by reconfiguration after service quality degradation or upgrade · CPC title

• G06F9/45558

  Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects · CPC title

• H04L41/0636

  based on a decision tree analysis · CPC title