Estimation of Point-to-Point Telephone Traffic

Trunk-group and point-to-point traffic data systems provide the measurements of telephone traffic which are used for the current and the long-range planning of the Bell System's Public Switched Network. Trunk-group data systems provide estimates of the traffic offered to existing trunk groups. Normally, an estimate of trunk-group offered load is based upon a direct measurement of the average number of busy trunks, the average attempt count, and the average overflow count.1 Point-to-point traffic data systems provide estimates of the telephone traffic which originates at one and terminates at the other of a specific pair of network points not necessarily joined by a single trunk group; for 2847 example, the end-office pair {Ai,B) of Fig. 1. In the trunk-provisioning process, estimates of point-to-point offered loads are required to plan for the introduction of new trunk groups and the rehoming of end-offices or tandems. In general, they are also used, as a supplement to trunkgroup measurements, in the network disassembly process (the process that converts measured loads on trunk groups which receive overflow traffic to first-route loads) and in the network assembly process (the process which converts projected first-route loads to total offered loads). Moreover, with the possible introduction of dynamic traffic routing, our studies have shown that the trunk-provisioning process will require more extensive use of point-to-point data than is required in the present hierarchical fixed-routing network.