Chinese telecom giant Huawei has rolled out a fresh take on Agner Krarup Erlang’s century-old traffic blocking theory to help manage data on mobile broadband networks.
According to Erlang’s 1909 theory – used primarily for voice communications – new calls will be blocked or waitlisted when all channels in a system are occupied. Current mobile broadband systems, however, call for all customers utilizing data services to share network bandwidth resources. Huawei indicated such a setup is unsustainable given the massive growth in data use and hotspots.
The company thus proposed a method of evaluating system capacity using both experience blocking and resource usage, and also came up with an experience blocking table to “facilitate scientific planning, the optimization of system capacity, and to incorporate data service characteristics into the system capacity design.”
From Huawei’s press release:
“For example, assuming 5 Mbps is required for each user to play 1080p video without stalling, for a typical LTE cell with an average throughput of 40 Mbps, the cell capacity can be equivalent to eight (40/5 = 8) logical channels. During system capacity design, given that the video playback blocking (video stalling) probability is 5 percent, the cell can satisfy the needs of an average of five concurrent video users.
If an operator requires high video fluency and decreases the video playback blocking probability to 2 percent, according to the experience blocking traffic theory, a cell with a throughput of 45 Mbit/s (nine logical channels) is needed. Therefore, this theory can be used to help design improved network capacity.”
The company said its mLAB has released an application kit based on the traffic blocking theory for data services, which includes a traffic model analysis and simulation platform and an experience blocking table SDK.
Huawei said its research has been incorporated into IEEE’s International Conference on Communications and will be released during the show in May. A whitepaper on the theory can be found here.
Filed Under: Infrastructure