ANSI ATIS 0100030-2012 Mean Time Between Outages C A Generalized Metric for Assessing Production Failure Rates in Telecommunications Network Elements.pdf

1、AMERICAN NATIONAL STANDARD FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS ATIS-0100030.2012(R2017) MEAN TIME BETWEEN OUTAGES A GENERALIZED METRIC FOR ASSESSING PRODUCTION FAILURE RATES IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS NETWORK ELEMENTS As a leading technology and solutions development organization, ATIS brings together the top global

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11、te. Notice of Disclaimer hence the immediate focus on router reliability. The field reliability of modernprovider edge routers, which have a large variety of interface cards, cannot be accurately characterizedby a single downtime or reliability metric because it requires averaging the contributions

12、of the variousrouter components that may hide the poor reliability of some components. MTBO Positioned as a Practical Application of Traditional MTBF Failures in router elements go beyondthe traditional view of failures whereby only element failure leading to total replacement is considered forMTBF.

13、 In reality, there are other transient modes of failure such as software glitches that also lead todowntime for customer facing line cards. MTBO counts all failures that affect customer downtime besidesphysical replacement.Consequently, the initial focus of MTBO development in the first publication

14、of ATIS-0100030.2010 is exclusively from a router perspective customer facing line card downtime is the driver for MTBO estimation. Typically, a service provider Operations organization applies the MTBO metric across different routers and switches, including redundant configurations. In a redundant

15、configuration, a line-card failure is counted against MTBO only if there is no failover to the redundant card. As one could expect the MTBO goal (target) for the redundant configuration is much higher than that for a configuration without redundancy. For example, if the MTBO goal for single point of

16、 failure (SPOF) configuration is 100,000 hours, and the coverage factor is 0.99, then for a configuration with redundancy the MTBO goal will be 100,000/(1-0.99)=10,000,000 hours. In fact, the MTBO concept can be applied to any and all forms of telecommunication network elements, including elements w

17、ith redundancy. Given that the rapid pace of current telecommunications technologies spanning wireline and wireless networks is inevitable, it makes sense to try and manage equipment supplier product reliability that includes transient failures in addition to the more traditional type of MTBF physic

18、al replacement scenario. The following examples illustrate the applicability (and advantage) of the MTBO concept: 1. Any Software Controlled Device: For example, a transmission power amplifier in the UMTS nodeB or theLTE eNodeB will be turned off when its temperature exceeds some threshold, and then

19、 turned on whenits temperature decreases to a normal level. The number of such temporary outages with automaticrecovery can be counted against MTBO. In particular, a defective amplifier may have smaller MTBO incomparison with its predicted hardware MTBF. In such cases a proactive replacement in the

20、maintenancewindow can be issued that will prevent the production failure.2. Set of Software Control Devices: The UMTS elements such as nodeB and RNC, the LTE elements suchas eNodeB, etc., consist of a set of devices (subsystems), some of which are redundant. Failures of thesedevices (subsystems) may

21、 cause partial or complete service interruption for customers. The MTBO metriccan be calculated per device like in the previous example, or per element where device outages can begenerally weighted according to their customer impact. Equal weighting is applied if we do notdifferentiate between parti

22、al and complete outages.ATIS-0100030.2012(R2017) 4 3. Ethernet Quality Assessment: The MTBO metric can be applied to the quantification of quality of theEthernet connection between two routers based on the number of timeouts of a specific protocol like Bi-directional Forwarding Detection (BFD). The

23、intent is to test for frequency of short duration outages of theEthernet connection.This revision provides a generalized definition of the MTBO metric (Section 6). It retains the application of the metric to the Customer Facing Line Cards (Section 7). It then provides descriptions of applying the me

24、tric to additional situations described above (Section 8). 6 Generalized MTBO Definition In modern telecommunication networks, many electronic and media (e.g., Ethernet) components have short-time outages with automatic recovery. These outages may remain undetected because of their short duration (o

25、f the order of one second) but they have severe impact on services like VoIP/LTE, Telepresence, and any video application. The outage detection and respective outage time measurement can be done using fault detection alarms, BFD protocol, SLA protocol, etc. These measurements are used for the MTBO c

26、alculation in given time interval T as follows: 7 MTBO & Network Production Failure Rate Use of Customer Facing Line Cards A typical IP router consists of line cards (LC) carrying traffic and shared equipment (e.g., router processor, switching elements, and cooling devices). Each of these components

27、 has predicted Mean Time-Between Failure (P-MTBF) offered by the equipment supplier using traditional Telcordia methodology Telcordia SR-332, TL9000-Hbk. The P-MTBF metric is traditionally used to compare the predicted and production (or measured) failure rates of hardware elements in routers compri

28、sing service provider edge networks. However, hardware failures leading to element replacement are not the only reasons for service disruption. Line cards and router processors operate under control of complex software systems (including packet transmission protocols) that may also experience failur

29、es leading to temporary downtime for these elements. Consider a set of identical Customer Facing Line Cards. For these cards, all outages caused by hardware and software, including the entire router failures, are counted. This count is used to calculate the production line card failure rate in a giv

30、en time period (e.g., monthly) and the respective mean time between failures is referred to as MTBO. ATIS Technical Report ATIS-0100025 ATIS-0100025 described the use of a normalizing factor in determining the service availability impacts due to a variety of network element hardware and software out

31、ages. The use of Customer Facing Line Cards as the normalizing element was described in ATIS-0100025 and the MTBO was briefly presented as a component of estimating service availability impacts arising from various outages. The rationale for utilizing Customer Facing Line Cards is repeated in this c

32、lause. The Customer Facing Line Card is a common component to all elements that can cause service outages. These Line Cards are on the “drop side” of an Edge (Access) Router, where facilities from a customers CPE terminate on individual ports on the Line Cards. A failure in any element in the Access

33、 Network may result in downtime for individual ports on the Line Cards or on the entire Line Card on the Access Router. Such failures prevent delivery of customer transactions to the backbone. ATIS-0100030.2012(R2017) 5 KEY AR: Access (Edge) Router BR: Backbone Router LC: Customer Facing Line Card F

34、igure 1: Access Network Elements There are several element types in a typical IP Access Network topology (Figure 1) whose failure can cause downtime for Line Cards5directly or indirectly. Elements whose failures directly impact downtime are: Line Card on the customer facing side: Any failure in the

35、electronic or optical components of the LineCard that causes traffic interruption will result in Line Card downtime. Access (Edge) Routers that form an edge on an Internet Service Provider (ISP) backbone network: LineCard downtime can be caused by a failure in a router component or from a total rout

36、er failure.Network elements whose failures may indirectly impact Line Card downtime are: Facilities and supporting elements such as cross-connects, which link Access Routers to BackboneRouters: To increase the availability of the Access Network, an ISP usually provides redundancy byconnecting each A

37、ccess Router to two Backbone Routers at the same access node using twoindependent sets of uplinks6(Figure 1 depicts a typical access node with several Access Routers and twoBackbone Routers). This permits customer traffic to enter the backbone in the following failure scenarios:5Only transport layer

38、 failures that directly impact Customer Facing Line Cards are considered for this document, as shown in Figure 1 (access and backbone routers, their components, and facilities linking them). Failures of non-transport layer elements (e.g., service/application layer elements) are not considered. 6An u

39、plink is a facility (e.g., DS3, OC-3, OC-48) connecting any access router to a backbone router. ATIS-0100030.2012(R2017) 6 o A failed uplink.o A failed card supporting an uplink.o A failed Backbone Router at the access node.If all facilities linking an access router to a backbone router fail, then a

40、ll Line Cards at the access router will experience downtime. Backbone Routers linked to Access Routers: As shown in Figure 1, if both Backbone Routers at an accessnode fail (a rare event), then all Line Cards on the Access Routers at this node lose connection to thebackbone. Facilities linking Backb

41、one Routers at an access node, to backbone routers at other backbone nodes:Such facility failures decrease the available bandwidth from Access Routers to the backbone. Note that ifall Backbone Router uplinks at an access node fail (a rare event), then all Line Cards on the AccessRouters at this node

42、 lose connection to the backbone.Impacts on Line Cards from such failures are extremely rare as service providers typically have redundancy in the backbone (all elements that may indirectly cause Line Card downtime). Full redundancy in terms of facilities dual-homing the Access Routers to pairs of B

43、ackbone Routers are intended to serve this purpose. The estimation of MTBO and Production Failure Rates can then be done based on line card failure count caused by failures of customer facing line cards, both uplinks and the entire router for each combination of Router Class, Line Card Type. A Route

44、r Class is a set of identical access routers from a single vendor. The use of such sets can enable metric estimation for different router vendors. For example, if a network has routers from two separate vendors and each vendor produces two unique types of routers, then the total number of access rou

45、ters in the network can be grouped into four Router Classes one for each vendor, router type combination. The metrics can then be estimated for any Line Card type within any given Router Class. The generalized MTBO metric defined above is adapted for each Router Class, Line Card Type combination as

46、follows. Consider a set of access routers of the same class with J types of access line cards which are monitored for failures during time interval of length .T For each customer impacting failure i, i = 1, 2, , L, the number ijn of type j cards affected is recorded. Two points to note here: In case

47、 of redundancy, the failure of the active (primary) line card is not counted if the failover to thebackup card was hitless. Otherwise, only failures of active cards are counted. In case the entire router is down (due to router failure or due to downstream failures described in theprevious clause), t

48、hen all Line Cards on the router are considered to be down.Let Njbe the total number of Line Cards of type j in the given Router Class. Then, the MTBO metric for Class j type of Router Cards is denoted as: 1jj LijiNTMnConsequently, the Production Failure Rate metric associated with Line Card of type

49、 j can be written as: PFRj= 1/Mj 7 ATIS-0100030.2012(R2017) 8 MTBO Application for Other Cases MTBO application is illustrated with the following examples. 8.1 Set of Uniform Devices Consider a set of uniform devices/boards such as power amplifiers in the UMTS nodeB. Let N be the total number of amplifiers and there were n outages of these amplifiers during time interval with duration of T hours. We count outages with automatic recovery as well as those outages where the failed amplifier was replaced to restore the service. Then: NTMTBOnOne can expec