Detection of wiring defects

Abstract

A method for detecting a defect in wiring in a DSL system. The method includes collecting data including instantaneous values, a history of values, and/or parameters relating to a central office or customer premises equipment, analyzing a line for a wiring defect based on the collected data, and reporting whether or not a wiring defect was detected responsive to the analyzing step.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A Digital Subscriber Line wiring defect analyzer, comprising:
 a data collection module coupled to a plurality of sources of information in or connected to a DSL system from which to collect data;   a wiring defect analyzer module coupled to the data collection module to analyze the collected data to determine whether a wiring defect may exist in the DSL system; and   a report generator module coupled to the wiring defect analyzer module to receive a parameter value generated by the wiring defect analyzer module indicating whether a wiring defect may exist and provide the same to a DSL system operator.   
     
     
         2 . The DSL wiring defect analyzer of  claim 1 , wherein the plurality of sources of information in or connected to the DSL system includes a network management station, a managed entity in an access node, or a management information base (MIB), a broadband network, a database storing binder-level, topology information, crosstalk coupling, or modem capability information, service priorities, operational data, and parameter history data. 
     
     
         3 . The DSL wiring defect analyzer of  claim 1 , further comprising a DSL line instability analyzer coupled to the data collection module and the wiring defect analyzer module to analyze the collected data to determine whether line instability exists, and further wherein the wiring defect analyzer module to analyze the collected data analyzes whether any existing line instability is due to an existing wiring defect. 
     
     
         4 . The DSL wiring defect analyzer of  claim 3 , wherein the DSL line instability analyzer is to obtain and evaluate channel performance monitoring parameters or line performance monitoring parameters, or distributions of the parameters over time, to analyze whether any line instability exists.  
     
     
         5 . The DSL wiring defect analyzer of  claim 1 , wherein the wiring defect analyzer module in analyzing the collected data generates one or more metrics, based on the collected data and evaluating the one or metrics against a condition. 
     
     
         6 . The DSL wiring defect analyzer of  claim 5 , wherein evaluating the one or more metrics against the condition comprises comparing each of the one or more metrics against a respective threshold, and determining a wiring defect may exist if each of the metrics passes the respective threshold. 
     
     
         7 . The DSL wiring defect analyzer of  claim 5 , wherein the wiring defect analyzer module further comprises a combiner module that combines the metrics and compares them against a threshold according to one of a logical combination, a voting method, a weighted sum, or a geometric sum. 
     
     
         8 . The DSL wiring defect analyzer of  claim 5 , wherein each of the one or more metrics is one of a plurality of parameters including: an average bit change across a plurality of tones in a DSL signal transmitted on the DSL line, total bit change across a plurality of tones in the DSL signal transmitted on the DSL line, a number of tones which experience at least two bits absolute change compared to a previous tone, average noise change in the DSL signal, wherein noise change is obtained from one of Hlog, Hlin, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Quiet-Line-Noise (QLN), Mean Square Error (MSE) per tone, or a calculation based on one of SNR, Hlog, or Power Spectral Density (PSD). 
     
     
         9 . The DSL wiring defect analyzer of  claim 5 , wherein the metric is a measure of a rapid variation in line parameters. 
     
     
         10 . A method for detecting a defect in wiring in a DSL system, the method comprising:
 collecting data including instantaneous values, a history of values, and parameters relating to a central office or customer premises equipment;   analyzing a line for a wiring defect based on the collected data; and   reporting whether or not a wiring defect was detected responsive to the analyzing step.    
     
     
         11 . The method of  claim 10 , wherein the parameters relating to a central office or customer premises equipment include line inventory parameters, channel test, diagnostic and status parameters, line test, diagnostic and status parameters, line performance monitoring parameters, and line failures. 
     
     
         12 . The method of  claim 10 , further comprising analyzing the data collected by computing a metric based on the collected data and evaluating the metric against a condition. 
     
     
         13 . The method of  claim 12  wherein the metric is a measure of Hlog, a measure of Hlin, a measure of SNR, and a measured noise. 
     
     
         14 . The method of  claim 12  wherein the metric is a measure of a rapid variation in the line parameters. 
     
     
         15 . The method of  claim 12  wherein the analyzing the data comprises analyzing channel performance monitoring parameters and line performance monitoring parameters or evaluating distributions of these parameters over time, including:
 CV, code violations; 
 FEC, number of corrected codewords; 
 FECS, FEC seconds; 
 ES, errored seconds; 
 SES, severely errored seconds; 
 LOSS, loss-of-signal seconds; 
 UAS, unavailable seconds; 
 retrains; 
 retrain count; 
 resynchronization; and 
 resynchronization count.