By Jason Rupe & Jingjie Zhu, CableLabs
With the introduction of DOCSIS 3.1 technology, profiles and profile management became important to operators who wish to get the most out of their network capacity. With the resiliency advantages of DOCSIS 3.1 technology, network impairments impact service through a loss of capacity but not failure of service until these impairments become severe. Therefore, there is an opportunity to use lost capacity as away to measure the severity of impairments, and to prioritize proactive network maintenance (PNM) work as well. But with profiles being limited in number on many cable modem termination systems (CMTSs), the theoretical maximum capacity can’t always be obtained. So, profiles need to be considered to truly measure the impact of proactive maintenance operations.
In this paper, we present some competing methods for prioritizing PNM work in terms of optimal possible profiles, as well as the measures involved in setting these profiles (RxMER per subcarrier, and bit load). Depending on the conditions of the operator’s network and PNM tool capabilities, some solutions will be better than others. So, we will help operators decide an approach that works best for them. The solutions we compare will be offered as workers in our Proactive Operations (ProOps) platform as well, so that anyone interested can conveniently try them for themselves.