Implementing fault hierarchy to trace failures in home gateways

A home gateway (HG) acts as border router by selecting the correct route to different appliances using devices address and supervising resource assignment between the local and access networks. From the quality of service standpoint, minimizing the number of failures for this equipment is a way to gain customerpsilas confidence. To reach this goal, when a service terminates abnormally, the overall failure cause and impact need to be analyzed and quantified. This paper describes a fault hierarchy modeling for HGs: starting from test and field failure data, we analyzed the different failures gravity, their originpsilas correlation and their impact on the overall service architectural elements. The hierarchy interpreting the transition from faults to failures, a designer, or tester, can thus predict the consequences of a particular fault from this model. Our study yielded some test sets that help to trace potential failures, and to enhance the design specifications.