By John Huang, Cox Communications
Within North America, Cox Communications maintains one of the largest Converged Interconnect Network (CIN) deployments among service providers (Malla, 2021). The CIN is the component in a distributed access architecture (DAA) that makes Remote PHY (R-PHY) possible. It is essentially the transit layer that connects the Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) / Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) core to the Remote Physical Devices (RPDs) and makes the capabilities offered by DOCSIS 3.1 and beyond, possible.
An increasingly large proportion of Cox’s footprint is serviced by R-PHY as more and more nodes are digitalized. Hence, the CIN is foundational to a reliable product. Without a robust and dependable CIN, the increasing advantages and benefits inherently provided by ever-evolving DOCSIS technologies would be compromised. This metro delivery network, therefore, must be as reliable and resilient as possible.
The CIN must not only be adaptable to provide increasingly greater levels of bandwidth, but just as important, it must also evolve in its ability to withstand failures of various kinds.
In this paper, we will discuss some of the key high-availability methods and technologies utilized by Cox over the past several years to develop an increasingly resilient CIN network.