By Deepa Phanish, Ph.D., Alan Skinner, John Huang, Igor Tavrovsky & Ernest Fabre, Cox Communications
Cox’s Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) standard calls for deployment of a Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) chassis acting as Remote PHY core in every metro edge facility. To support the deployment of these chassis, we need substantial amounts of rack space, power, and HVAC at these critical facilities. In locations that have severe constraints we need an alternative solution to enable Remote PHY while avoiding highly expensive facility augmentations. In this paper, we explore our network design options to deploy a CCAP chassis non-locally in a host facility and to utilize our Converged Interconnect Network (CIN) to reduce the footprint at the remote edge facility. We discuss how to prioritize these solutions by their impact to service availability. The reliability analysis provides further insights into the design/decision thresholds for selecting a host site in a successful application of the remote head-end Extended (E)-CIN solution. We further discuss the implementation, limitations, and challenges of the E-CIN solution and assess impact to the business in terms of capacity planning and cost in comparison to the full-CIN solution. The outcome from this comprehensive analysis is very useful in deciding favorability of a given site as an E-CIN candidate.