Sources of Failure in the Public Switched Telephone Network
Reprinted from IEEE Computer, Vol. 30, No. 4 (April, 1997).
D. Richard Kuhn
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899 USA
kuhn@nist.gov
What makes a distributed system reliable? A study of failures in the US Public Switched Telephone Network shows that human intervention is one key to this large system's reliability.
To operate successfully, most large distributed systems depend on software, hardware, and human operators and maintainers to function correctly. Failure of any one of these elements can disrupt or bring down an entire system.
One such distributed system, the US Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), is the US portion of possibly the largest distributed system in existence.[1] Like all telephone switching networks, the PSTN performs a fairly simple task: It connects point A with point B. Paradoxically, this seemingly trivial task requires some of the most complex and sophisticated computing systems in existence. Software for a switch with even a relatively small set of features may comprise several million lines of code.
The PSTN contains thousands of switches. Switches include redundant hardware and extensive self-checking and recovery software. For several decades, AT&T has expected its switches to experience not more than two hours of failure in 40 years [2] a failure rate of 5.7 x 10^-6.
Since 1992, telephone companies have been required to notify the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of outages affecting more than 30,000 customers. I used these outage records to determine the principal causes of PSTN failures. To account for the possible effects of seasonal fluctuations in call processing volume, I analyzed failures over two years, from April 1992 to March 1994, beginning with the earliest FCC reports. I made quantitative measures of how each failure source affects system dependability, in an effort to shed some...