Modeling the Impact of Software Faults in CCS Networks

摘要

Field experience indicates that software faults appear to be a major source of network outages,especially in the last few years with the increased deployment of the Common Channel Signaling (CCS) network.Currently,defensive mechanisms against software faults in the mplementation of Signaling System Number 7(SS7)protocol are outside the scope of the SS7 protocol definition.We demonstrate with the aid of few examples that the lack Of defensive mechanisms to handle certain software faults may lead to network wide failures.In this paper we use the Finite State Machine(FSM)representation to model the impact of software faults in different critical SS7 protocol functionalities.We also show that by using the FSM modeling.we can identify certain functionalities that could be corrupted in order to test other critical SS7 protocol functions.