Twisted Pair Cable Fault Diagnosis via Random Forest Machine Learning

Applying the fault diagnosis techniques to twisted pair copper cable is beneficial to improve the stability and reliability of internet access in Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Access Network System. The network performance depends on the occurrence of cable fault along the copper cable. Currently, most of the telecommunication providers monitor the network performance degradation hence troubleshoot the present of the fault by using commercial test gear on-site, which may be resolved using data analytics and machine learning algorithm. This paper presents a fault diagnosis method for twisted pair cable fault detection based on knowledge-based and data-driven machine learning methods. The DSL Access Network is emulated in the laboratory to accommodate VDSL2 Technology with various types of cable fault along the cable distance between 100 m to 1200 m. Firstly, the line operation parameters and loop line testing parameters are collected and used to analyze. Secondly, the feature transformation, a knowledge-based method, is utilized to pre-process the fault data. Then, the random forests algorithms (RFs), a data-driven method, are adopted to train the fault diagnosis classifier and regression algorithm with the processed fault data. Finally, the proposed fault diagnosis method is used to detect and locate the cable fault in the DSL Access Network System. The results show that the cable fault detection has an accuracy of more than 97%, with less minimum absolute error in cable fault localization of less than 11%. The proposed algorithm may assist the telecommunication service provider to initiate automated cable faults identification and troubleshooting in the DSL Access Network System.