A MEASURED-TRAFFIC-BASED BANDWIDTH DIMENSIONING METHOD FOR INTERNET ATM BACKBONE NETWORKS

A traffic engineering method has been developed to meet the requiremen ts for efficient bandwidth dimensioning and for a practical and consol idated network design method. It characterizes the offered-traffic bur stiness on a transit link by using time-series measurement of the aggr egate traffic. It estimates future traffic characteristics based on th e average traffic volume at that time which is easily derived from tre nd analysis, i.e., an x% increase in bandwidth each year and gives the required link capacity. Simulation showed that the parameters estimat ed using this method fit the actual behavior of a network well. This m ethod enables an appropriate bandwidth to be allocated to a transit li nk without having to estimate the specific traffic characteristics for each connection over the link. Once the burstiness parameter and its trend have been identified based on this method, it is possible to use a simple traffic measurement method to detect changes in network traf fic and feed them back to the engineering procedure.