Preserving and Extracting Traffic Value

Thus we see that the shift in offered traffic (the need to preserve the properties of
bursty bandwidth) fundamentally changes the way we have to treat traffic as it moves
into and through the network. It is the job of the network to not only preserve this
value but extract some value as the traffic passes.
Table 14.4 shows some of the cost/value issues involved in preserving the properties
of highly asynchronous offered traffic and capturing some of the value contained
in passing traffic. The handset has to have hardware and software capable of capturing
and processing the complex multimedia mix—a task requiring substantial multitasking
and multiplexing at the application layer. The real-time operating system and manmachine
interface (mmi) need to be responsive to these task requirements.

We then need to preserve the asynchronous properties of the offered traffic over the
physical layer. We need to manage admission control at the base station and RNC, and
we need to provision storage bandwidth at various points in the network, including
the handset, the base station, and the RNC. We may decide to provide some data warehousing
capabilities in the network (adding archiving value to delivery value). If traffic
is then moved into and through the core network, we need to preserve offered
traffic properties, including offered traffic asynchronicity. Typically at some stage in its
journey, highly asynchronous traffic will need to be moved on to a synchronous transport
layer SONET, over the wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) optical layer;
that is, we move traffic on through the network in an organized and deterministic way.
We may also need to store the traffic, that is, warehouse it for future delivery, a process
best described as long-term buffering. 353