  Fault Management (FM) is a cardinal feature in communication networks. One of
the most common FM approaches is to use periodic keepalive messages. Hence,
switches and routers are required to transmit a large number of FM messages
periodically, requiring a hardware-based packet generator that periodically
transmits a set of messages that are stored in an expensive on-chip memory.
With the rapid growth of carrier networks, and as 5G technologies emerge, the
number of users and the traffic rates are expected to significantly increase
over the next few years. Consequently, we expect the on-chip memories used for
FM to become a costly component in switch and router chips. We introduce a
novel approach in which FM messages are stored in compressed form in the
on-chip memory, allowing to significantly reduce the memory size. We present
FM-Delta, a simple hardware-friendly delta encoding algorithm that allows FM
messages to be compressed by a factor of 2.6. We show that this compression
ratio is very close to the results of the zlib compression library, which
requires much higher implementation complexity.
