Detection and Localization of Failures in Hybrid Fiber–Coaxial Network Using Big Data Platform

Abstract

Modern HFC (Hybrid Fiber–Coaxial) networks comprise millions of users. It is of great importance for HFC network operators to provide high network access availability to their users. This requirement is becoming even more important given the increasing trend of remote working. Therefore, network failures need to be detected and localized as soon as possible. This is not an easy task given that there is a large number of devices in typical HFC networks. However, the large number of devices also enable HFC network operators to collect enormous amounts of data that can be used for various purposes. Thus, there is also a trend of introducing big data technologies in HFC networks to be able to efficiently cope with the huge amounts of data. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for efficient failure detection and localization in HFC networks using a big data platform. The proposed mechanism utilizes the already present big data platform and collected data to add one more feature to big data platform—efficient failure detection and localization. The proposed mechanism has been successfully deployed in a real HFC network that serves more than one million users.