Designer Viewpoint (1)

• Network design depends on applications planned for the network

• Size of traffic

  • units like bits, bytes, octets, messages, blocks are packaged into files, packets, frames, cells
  • data transfer is measured by the number of units or packages transmitted per unit time (Mbps, KBps, pps)

• Traffic characteristics

  • burstiness = (peak rate) / (average rate); a source that infrequently sends traffic is said to be very bursty (example: one e-mail per hour vs. continuous video stream)

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