Failure diagnosis with incomplete information in cable networks

Abstract

Cable network has become one of the most popular ways of high-speed Internet access for homes and small businesses. For broadband cable providers, managing their large-scale network infrastructure is highly challenging because these networks are geographically dispersed and contain a large number of devices. A single administrative area typically serves hundreds of thousands of end-customers (or cable modems) with thousands of intermediate distribution devices that operate on different protocol layers. Such devices include routers, Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS's), fiber nodes, repeaters, etc. It is, thus, critical for the providers to monitor the health of their infrastructure and perform quick failure diagnosis. However, there are many challenges in failure diagnosis. In this paper, we focus on two challenges that are motivated by input from a large U.S. cable provider: missing device status information and incomplete topology.