Analysis of Communication Networks: Call Centres, Traffic and Performance

Book excerpt: This volume consists of the proceedings of the Workshop on Analysis and Simulation of Communication Networks held at The Fields Institute (Toronto). The workshop was divided into two main themes, entitled "Stability and Load Balancing of a Network of Call Centres" and "Traffic and Performance". The call centre industry is large and fast-growing. In order to provide top-notch customer service, it needs good mathematical models. The first part of the volume focuses on probabilistic issues involved in optimizing the performance of a call centre. While this was the motivating application, many of the papers are also applicable to more general distributed queueing networks. The second part of the volume discusses the characterization of traffic streams and how to estimate their impact on the performance of a queueing system. The performance of queues under worst-case traffic flows or flows with long bursts is treated. These studies are motivated by questions about buffer dimensioning and call admission control in ATM or IP networks. This volume will serve researchers as a comprehensive, state-of-the-art reference source on developments in this rapidly expanding field.