Hi there,
I just want to know if there is any article I can read about capacity planning in DOCSIS networks. I'm mostly interested to know if there are mathematical models or frameworks to project our access networks capacity (that will help us to know where a new equipment will be necessary). Any advice will be gladly received. I have found this paper:
http://www.cedmagazine.com/articles/2005/10/managing-capacity-in-docsis-...
I couldn't find Part I, I appreciate if somebody knows how could I acquire it of if there are any other papers.
Regards
You can use MRTG or Cacti to poll and display DS and US utilisation. This is good for viewing the highs and lows by time of day.
Also you can run netflow on the CMTS and then use your billing/provisioning system to group modems by node and report on how much traffic is seen at each node. This can be handy in additional to above as typically you will have > 1 node per US and almost always > 1 node per DS, so its sometimes hard to see from the graphs how much traffic each node is consuming.
Once you have such data you can easily group quiet nodes together or split busy nodes further to spread usage evenly over the CMTS interfaces. No point having some interfaces maxing out while others only have low utilisation.
If you have got the traffic evenly spread, but interfaces are still full then its time for more linecards!
Thank you Michael. I actually have developed a system to graph each node with NetFlow data. Do you take any action when there is only few CMs causing the congestion? Is it better to use IPDR than NetFlow to congestion analisys?
Another question is: how do you know when is a good time for thinking of moving or spliting nodes? Do you have any parameter or key value that let you do such decision?
Thanks in advance.
Thank you Michael. I actually have developed a system to graph each node with NetFlow data. Do you take any action when there is only few CMs causing the congestion? Is it better to use IPDR than NetFlow to congestion analisys?
Another question is: how do you know when is a good time for thinking of moving or spliting nodes? Do you have any parameter or key value that let you do such decision?
Thanks in advance.
CAPACITY PLANNING in DOCSIS network
main keys that you have to control and monitor (at DOCSIS level):
- customers utilization (commercial offer, behavior, services...) it always grows...
- number of customers per node and interface
- number of Frequencies per node
- DOCSIS configuration of CMTS
- DOCSIS capacity of CM
There is no capacity planning model because too many keys vary between networks.
Alerts are the same: every one monitor interface usage and part of them use a relevant indicators to build reports.
But you should have a correct vision of your network (keys) front of those indicators because resolution can be:
- frequency modulation modification
- frequency bandwidth modification
- node affectation
- segmentation
- new interface implementation
...
Today solutions for DOCSIS network are weak to understand your business and take the right decision.
Even more with DOCSIS 3 technology so you should go to http://www.oss-iris.com and check for our solution.
You can already try it by yourself for free (up to 50k Modems) directly "in the cloud" with simple implementation.
Thank you. I'm going to look at your solution.