Teletraffic engineering

Teletraffic engineering, also known as telecommunications traffic engineering, uses ideas from how traffic moves on roads to help with telecommunications. Teletraffic engineers use math, statistics, and models to learn how traffic flows through networks like telephone systems and the Internet. They watch patterns to guess how well a network will work and plan ways to keep services working well while saving money.

This field started with the work of A. K. Erlang, who made methods for circuit-switched networks. Today, these ideas help manage many kinds of networks, including those that use packet-switching, because they share similar patterns that can be studied and guessed.

One key idea in teletraffic engineering is that when you look at very big systems over long times, the overall behavior becomes easier to guess. This helps engineers make networks that can handle many users without stopping.