Evaluating downtime and maintenance time in communication networks

In this paper, a method for evaluating maintainability in communication networks is described. In communication networks, as different types of failures occur and a variety of maintenance actions are performed, the characteristics of service downtime are widely distributed. Therefore, service downtime has to be evaluated by categorizing failures and analyzing outage data. A procedure for handling the related data is described. In addition, examples of evaluating service downtime by using the outage data and maintenance data collected from an actual communication network are presented. Moreover, the relationship between service downtime and maintenance-related times is verified. The methods facilitate the operation and management of carrier-grade communication networks provided to millions of end users. Our proposed procedure can be flexibly applied to various types of network equipment.