Overprovisioning is a very common approach to providing quality of service in IP backbone networks. By ensuring the presence of enough capacity in the network so that demands are met, even at peak times and under failure conditions, significant queue buildup can be prevented. This assures that the three key IP QoS requirements, low delay, low jitter and low packet loss, are satisfactorily met.

In today's economic climate efficiency has become a key aspect of building networks, and operators are looking for the minimum amount of overprovisioning to meet QoS requirements. Rules of thumb, such as a maximum link load of 50%, might not be an acceptable approach any more.

In this presentation, we analyze some backbone traffic traces at different timescales. We show that aggregated traffic is well behaved, and present a methodology and simple empirical rule for capacity allocation on backbone links.

About the Presenter
Thomas Telkamp is Director of Network Architecture at Global Crossing, responsible for the planning and architecture of Global Crossing's MPLS backbone, Internet services, and VPNs. Before joining Global Crossing in January 1999, he was at AT&T-Unisource Communications Services (now Infonet Europe) and SURFnet. He has also worked as a consultant for several companies, including DANTE and Wunderman Cato Johnson.