Standardization of Traffic Measurements and Models for Broadband Neworks: open issues

The International Telecommunications Union _ITU. Study Group 2 is preparing recommendations concerning traffic engineering to support broadband services, for which measurements and modeling are a key component. The present paper reviews three problem areas that could be of interest to teletraffic researchers and for which the ITU would appreciate future contributions. The first area concerns the potential interactions of standardized, algorithmic traffic descriptors with stochastic models for cell traffic variables. The second area is on the appropriate definition of cell-level and call-level measurements that enable the inference of important characteristics of the traffic and of the performance of the network. The last area concerns long-range dependent versus Markovian models and the need for future work to consider the endogenous character of data traffic given feedback controls.