Traveling Maintenance System Design for Wide-Area Telecommunication Networks

This paper proposes a traveling maintenance method as a new network maintenance model. For failure recovery, the proposed method utilizes permissible time, which keeps high availability, ensured by shared backup resources. In the proposed method, even though a failure occurs in a communication facility, maintenance staff waits for occurrence of successive failures in other communication facilities during the permissible time instead of immediately tackling the failure. Then the maintenance staff successively go to the communication facilities that have faulty devices and repair them. By doing so, the proposed method can reduce the amount of time that the maintenance staff consumes for fault recovery. Furthermore, this paper provides a system design that aims at optimizing 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.