Teletraffic engineering

Telecommunications traffic engineering, teletraffic engineering, or traffic engineering is the application of traffic engineering theory to telecommunications. Teletraffic engineers use their knowledge of statistics including queuing theory, the nature of traffic, their practical models, their measurements and simulations to make predictions and to plan telecommunication networks such as a telephone network or the Internet. These tools and knowledge help provide reliable service at lower cost.

The field was created by the work of A. K. Erlang for circuit-switched networks but is applicable to packet-switched networks, as they both exhibit Markovian properties, and can hence be modeled by e.g. a Poisson arrival process.

The crucial observation in traffic engineering is that in large systems the law of large numbers can be used to make the aggregate properties of a system over a long period of time much more predictable than the behaviour of individual parts of the system.

The measurement of traffic in a public switched telephone network (PSTN) allows network operators to determine and maintain the quality of service (QoS) and in particular the grade of service (GoS) that they promise their subscribers. The performance of a network depends on whether all origin-destination pairs are receiving a satisfactory service.

Networks are handled as:

Congestion is defined as the situation when exchanges or circuit groups are inundated with calls and are unable to serve all the subscribers. Special attention must be given to ensure that such high loss situations do not arise. To help determine the probability of congestion occurring, operators should use the Erlang formulas or the Engset calculation.

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