Estimating Time Congestion from Traffic Parameters

We address the problem of estimating the time congestion on a finite trunk group from the size of the group and the mean and peakedness factor of the offered traffic. In order to be able to assess the relative merits of the various estimates, we adopt a common setting where the offered traffic is simple overflow traffic. Next to giving brief descriptions of earlier results, we elaborate on some of the earlier suggestions, and discuss some new approaches to the problem. Our numerical evaluation of the various approximations for time congestion induced by simple overflow traffic distinctly reveals the superiority of a variant of Frederieks' approximation procedure.