Troubleshooting for Network Operators

Introduction

“We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain”

Stephen Hawking

Network troubleshooting plays an important part in the network. This is because computer networks have rapidly evolved along with the significant growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), increasing not only a network coverage, but also the complexity in the computer network, bringing a risk of incurring problems in the network. For example, there are many problems in the network, including server disruptions, cyberattacks, link failure, etc. Therefore, network troubleshooting, which is a process of detecting an anomaly, identifying its root causes and implementing remediation approaches to solve it definitively, is studied thoroughly by the research community (see Fonseca and Mota (2017); Yu et al. (2018); Cherrared et al. (2019)).

Regarding server disruptions, Table I.1 illustrates the total downtime and corresponding money lost for several service providers (Gagnaire et al. 2012). For instance, YouTube and PayPal lost from $34,000 to over $6,700,000 because of a few hours of disruption on their cloud servers due to failures.

Besides, many cloud services nowadays are disrupted by cyberattacks (e.g. distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, etc.). A DDoS attack is a kind of cyberattack designed to overload and disrupt network services by exhausting them with access requests. In February 2020, Amazon announced that their AWS Shield services mitigated the largest recorded ...