A network dependence graph for modeling network services and its use in fault location

As network services become more diverse and powerful, service applications that perform such services are acquiring an ever-larger amount of complicat ed and changeable relationships. We present a network dependence graph (NDG ) that captures both data and control flow relationships between components of service applications that work collaboratively. This graph is construct ed based on analysis of both the behavior of each of the service applicatio ns and their configuration, which describes the device names they refer to, and allows network slicing to be implemented as a simple graph traversal. Network slicing is the extraction of necessary and minimum service componen ts that may affect the execution of a specified service application; it hel ps a, network manager to find the location of service faults lurking somewh ere in the network. We also present a method for locating faults that uses network slicing and a system based on this method.