OSPF monitor

• US 20040190457A1
• Filed: 02/25/2004
• Published: 09/30/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 03/24/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: RPX Corporation
• Original Assignee: Alcatel SA (Nokia Corporation)
• Inventors: Mohr, Thomas
• Granted Patent: US 7,630,322 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/241
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/12 Discovery or management of network topologies
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/22 comprising specially adapted graphical user interfaces [GUI]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/0811 by checking connectivity

Abstract

A network monitor monitors traffic on a dedicated data network passively. The data network connects network controllers which control associated network elements of an automatically switched optical transport network. The network controllers regularly advertise their locally stored network topology and status information using a predefined protocol. The monitor filters protocol frames of this predefined protocol type and extracts therefrom information about the topology and status of the transport network and displays these information graphically to a user.

Claims

1. A network monitor for passively monitoring traffic on a dedicated packet-switched data network connecting network controllers controlling associated network elements of an automatically switched optical transport network;

said monitor being adopted and programmed

to filter protocol frames of a predefined protocol type by which said network controllers advertise the network topology and status; and

to extract from the filtered protocol frames information about the topology and status of the transport network and displays these information graphically to a user.

2. A network monitor according to claim 1, comprising a sniffer module adapted and programmed to capture data from the data network connection, or read data from a previously capture file and to pass said captured data to an evaluation module adapted and programmed to extract said topology and status information from the captured data and to display these information graphically on a display.

3. A network monitor according to claim 1, wherein said frames of a predefined protocol type are OSPF frames comprising information about routing controllers, border nodes of domains and links to and from the border nodes.

4. A network monitor according to claim 1, adapted and programmed to represent domains as indicated by their corresponding routing controllers as smaller circles along a circle line of a larger circle.

5. A network monitor according to claim 1, adapted and programmed to represent links with idle capacity in a first color and busy links in a second color.

6. A network monitor according to claim 1, further comprising a command line interface to one of the network controllers adapted to program said connected network controller to broadcast a request for an immediate update of topology and status information and/or to program said network controller to set up a new connection and/or perform other configuration changes in said automatically switched optical transport network.

7. A network monitor according to claim 1, further being adapted and programmed to detect a mismatch between any two filtered protocol frames and display these frames as ASCII text to a user.

8. A method of passively monitoring traffic on a dedicated packet-switched data network connecting network controllers controlling associated network elements of an automatically switched optical transport network;

said method comprising the steps of

filtering protocol frames of a predefined protocol type by which said network controllers advertise the network topology and status;

extracting from the filtered protocol frames information about the topology and status of the transport network and

displaying these information graphically to a user.