System design for traveling maintenance in wide-area telecommunication networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a traveling maintenance method based on the resource pool concept, as a new network maintenance model. For failure recovery, the proposed method utilizes permissible time that is ensured by shared resource pools. In the proposed method, even if a failure occurs in a communication facility, maintenance staff wait for occurrence of successive failures in other communication facilities during the permissible time instead of immediately tackling the failure. Then, the maintenance staff successively visit the communication facilities that have faulty devices and collectively repair them. Therefore, the proposed method can reduce the amount of time that the maintenance staff take for fault recovery. Furthermore, this paper provides a system design that optimizes the proposed traveling maintenance according to system requirements determined by the design philosophy of telecommunication networks. Through simulation experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method.