Patent ID: 7342923

Claim:
A method of estimating an effective bandwidth requirement of a traffic flow at a node in a communications network with an associated database of relationships, the database having been provided by: identifying a type of traffic flow off-line; estimating a mean rate of traffic flow of the identified type of traffic flow; estimating the effective bandwidth requirement of this flow; defining a relationship between the effective bandwidth requirement and the mean rate of traffic flow for this identified type of traffic flow; and storing in the database of relationships, the relationship for different identifiable types of traffic flows, and in which the method comprises: (a) sampling a traffic flow on-line at the node; (b) identifying the type of traffic flow on-line at the node; (c) estimating the mean rate of the traffic flow on-line; (d) comparing the identified type of the traffic flow on-line to a similar identified type of traffic flow off-line to obtain a relationship from the database of relationships; and (e) estimating an effective bandwidth requirement of the traffic flow on-line at the node from the estimated mean rate of the traffic flow and the relationship obtained from the database of relationships.