traffic that shows noticeable (and when scaled, remarkably similar) burst patterns at a wide range of time scales - typically four or five orders of magnitude, milliseconds, seconds, tens of seconds, hundreds of seconds, thousands of seconds. It's rather like qualifying the effect of using multiple OVSF codes at the radio layer, we can predict the dynamic range of the burstiness but not when the burstiness will occur, through we can predict how often it will occur. Kihong Park's work is based on multiple-source variable bit rate video. The traffic coming from mobile broadband devices is not dissimilar, therefore we need to consider the impact of this traffic on network resource provisioning. Self-similar traffic has long-range dependence - this means that it has a cumulative 'fill effect' on the buffer, in other words we need more buffer bandwidth than traditional telecom traffic theory would suggest. However, if we add additional buffer bandwidth we not only increase end-to-end delay (first-order effect) but end-to-end delay variability (second-order effect). Given that as we shift towards a richer media multiplex with an increasing percentage Making Telecoms Work of conversational traffic exchanges our traffic by definition will become less elastic, this will be problematic. 17.7.1 So What's the Answer? Philippe Jacquet, one of the contributors to Kihong Park's book paints a gloomy picture 'Actual router capacitors are dangerously underestimated with regard to traffic conditions' While this is almost certainly true it is also reasonable to say that provided transmission bandwidth is adequately provisioned then next-generation networks will work quite well but will cost rather more than expected. It also implies a significant shift away from present network processor design trends and a shift in the functional partitioning between software switching (flexible but slow) or hardware switching (fast but inflexible). You can of course have flexible and fast but end up with overcomplex and expensive parallel processi