By Ian Wheelock, Hari Nair, ARRIS
DOCSIS networks have always had good instrumentation for cable plant monitoring.
The cable modems in the plant also function as probes for the network providing the operator good visibility into physical plant conditions. However as DOCSIS networks become the ubiquitous access network over which a wide variety of media and communications are delivered, and subscriber expectations of quality of service have been raised, operators have wanted to expand their understanding of network conditions from physical metrics to the quality of service delivered to customers.
In this paper, we describe a method to expand the role of DOCSIS Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) from physical and packet- level monitoring probes to aiding in service monitoring. We describe the considerations in the choice of active probes, and the network and service impact considerations from performing these tests.