Network traffic modeling for load prediction: a user-centric approach

Nowadays, networks have to be able to cope with ever increasing traffic demands in order to deliver the desired quality to end users. Thus, proper network planning is essential in order to preserve telecom revenues by reduced income per bandwidth unit. This article addresses a user-centric approach to network and user traffic modeling that has been validated and used in the process of introducing, optimizing, and planning new services at the Slovenian national telecom operator and service provider, Telekom Slovenije d.d. The proposed approach is based on the end users and their user group profiles that are founded on real measurements from the observed telecommunication network consisting of more than 1000 MSANs and more than 300,000 subscribers. The proposed approach has been successfully validated, showing that for the observed period the modeled link load deviates less than 5 percent from the measurements. Furthermore, in the presented case study the proposed approach is used successfully in the process of introducing the Fast Channel Change service.