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Module3-
Telecommunications Traffic

Introduction,
Unit of traffic,
Congestion,
Traffic measurement,
Mathematical model
Lost call systems,
Queuing Systems
 Introduction
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 Definition of Trunk : In teletraffic engineering, trunk

is used to describe any entity that will carry one call.

 It may be an international circuit with a length of

thousands of kilometres or a few meters of wire
between switches in the same telephone exchange.
 Trunking: the arrangement of trunks and switches
within a telephone exchange is called trunking.

 Definition of traffic: Traffic intensity or simple traffic

is defined as the average number of calls in progress
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• The way in which the average traffic varies

during the working day at a typical medium size
telephone exchange or a transmission route.
• There are very few calls during the night.
• The number of calls rises as people go to work
and reaches a maximum by the middle of the
Morning
Busy hour: It is a period of one hour, which
corresponds to the peak traffic load. In figure Busy
hour is from 10 am to 11 am.
 1ERLANG OF TRAFFIC ON 3
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TRUNKS

one Erlang of traffic can result from one trunk being busy all
of the time,
for each of two trunks being busy for half of time or from
each of three trunks being busy for one third of the time as
in figure a, b and c.
5 Unit of traffic
 Traffic intensity or simple traffic is defined
as the average number of calls in
progress.
 The unit of traffic is Erlang [E], named

after A.K Erlang the Danish pioneer of

traffic.
 On a group of trunks the average number

of calls in progress depends on both the

number of calls which arrive and their
duration
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From the definition of the Erlang that the traffic

carried by the group of trunk is given by
A= C h/T
C – Avg number of call arrivals during time T
A – Traffic in erlangs
h – Avg call holding time
Holding time- duration of a call, it holds a
trunk for that time
 Unit of traffic
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 Traffic intensity – average number of calls in

progress
 It is a dimensionless unit, ‘Erlang’ (E)
 Holding time- duration of a call, it holds a trunk
for that time
 In North America,
Traffic is expressed in terms of ‘Hundreds of call
seconds per hour’ (CCS)
1 hour = 3600 Sec
1 erlang = 36 CCS
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 If T = h then A = C
 Thus number of calls arriving during a period
equal to the mean duration of the calls.
 Since single trunk cannot carry more than on call
A < =1
 Occupancy of the trunk is Average proportion of
time for which trunk is busy
 The probability of finding a trunk busy is equal to
the proportion of time for which the trunk is busy.
Thus this probability = occupancy of the
trunk.
 Congestion
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• The situation, where all the trunks in a group of

trunks are busy, and so it can accept no further
calls, this state is known as congestion.
 In message switching system, calls that arrive
during congestion wait in a queue until an
outgoing trunk becomes free. Thus they are
delayed but not lost, such systems are queuing
or delay system
 In circuit switching system (example: telephone
exchange), all attempts to make a call over a
congested group of trunks are unsuccessful, such
systems are called as lost-call systems.
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 In lost call system

Traffic Carried= Traffic offered- Traffic
lost
 The proportion of calls that is lost or
delayed due to congestion is a measure of
the service provided. It is called as grade
of service (B).
 For a lost
B
call system,
Number of callsthe
lost grade of service,
B can be defined
Number ofas:
calls offered
Traffic lost
 
Traffic offered
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For Lost call system

B = Proportion of the time which
congestion exists
= Probability of congestion
= Probability that a call will be lost due to
congestion

If Traffic A Erlangs is offered to a group of

trunks having grade of service B, the traffic lost
is AB
and the traffic carried= A-AB
OR
 TRAFFIC MEASUREMENT
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 It means that measuring of busy hour traffic is

necessary & regularly operating company need to
measure and must keep records.
 By definition, measuring the traffic carried amounts
to counting calls in progress at regular intervals
during the busy hour and averaging results
 In the past, engineers counted the plugs inserted in
a manual switchboard or the number of selector-off.
Later automatic traffic records were used in
automatic exchange.
 In modern stored program controlled system,
the central processors generate records of the calls
that they set up.
 MATHEMATICAL MODEL
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 To obtain analytical solutions to

teletraffic problems it is necessary to
have a mathematical model of the traffic
offered to telecommunication system.
 A simple model is based on the following
assumptions:
 Pure chance traffic
 Statistical equilibrium
 Pure chance traffic
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(Poisson traffic)
 The assumption of pure chance traffic
means that call arrivals and call
terminations are independent random
events. Sometimes it is also called as
(Poisson traffic)
 If call arrivals are independent random
events, their occurrence is not affected by
previous calls.
Sometimes traffic is called as
memoryless traffic.
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 This assumption of random call arrivals &

termination leads to the following results:
1. The number of call arrivals in a given time has

a Poisson distribution i.e.

x
P x   e 
x!

Where x is the number of call arrivals in a given

time T and μ is the mean number of call
arrivals in time T.
For this reason, pure-chance traffic is also called
Possonian traffic.
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1. The intervals, T, between call arrivals are the
intervals between independent random
event.These intervals have a negative exponential
distribution, i.e,
P(T  t)  e - t / T
Where T is the mean interval between call arrivals.
 Since the arrival of each call and also the intervals
between two random events, call durations,T, are
also the intervals between two random events and
have a negative exponential distribution, i,e.,
P(T ≥ t) = e−t / h
Where h is the mean call duration time (holding time)
 Statistical equilibrium:
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 The assumption of Statistical equilibrium

means that the generation of traffic is a
stationary random process i.e.,
probabilities do not change during the
period being considered.
 Consequently the mean number of calls in
progress remains constant
 Statistical equilibrium is not obtained
immediately before the busy hour, when
the calling rate is increasing nor at the end
of the busy hour, when calling rate is falling.
 State transition diagram
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for N Trunks
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 When we have N trunks the number of calls

in progress varies randomly as shown in the
figure.
 It is an example of Birth and death process
also called as renewal process. The
number of calls in progress is always
between 0 and N. Thus it has N+1
states and its behavior depends on the
probability of change from each state to
the one above and to the one below it.
This is called as simple Markov chain
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