Early detection of link failures through the modeling of the hardware deterioration process

Network failures can significantly degrade the network performance in several ways, ranging from experiencing unacceptable delays (e.g., in video conference applications) to leading to significant drops in sales for companies (e.g., airlines tickets purchases). In this paper, we focus on network failures caused by links that are prone to fail due to their advanced stage of lifetime. In particular, the formalization of the Hardware Deterioration Failure Mode (HDFM) for network line cards is provided to evaluate the penalty for network operators of handling HDFM failing links using classical methods based on Bidirectional Forwarding Detection and Fast Re-Route mechanisms. An algorithm, named Hardware Deterioration Detection (HDD), is proposed to detect if links are experiencing failures as well as to provide an estimation of their remaining lifetime. The performance evaluation over data generated by our provided network failure simulator shows that HDD is able to correctly classify links as failing or not failing, regardless of the type of failure considered. Moreover, overall descriptions for failure models in which HDD is able to produce high quality estimations of the remaining lifetime have been identified, with a trade-off between the hardware deterioration time dependence and the relationship between lifetime and packet loss probability.