B. When the desired end-to-end delay factor flarget is close to 1, approach (1) can be used SO that each link along the path is assigned to the same delay factor equal to frarget For the case of the desired end-to-end delay factor ftarget significantly larger than 1, if the network operators try to minimize the transport costs on the last mile links then approach (2) can be applied to assign frarger to the last mile link whereas set the target delay factors for all other links along the way to a value a little higher than 1. Approach (3) can be used for both cases. Given K concatenated links along the transport path, approach (3) will assign the same delay factor every link along the path, which is equal ( fiarger + (K - 1)) to to 8.3.3 Dimensioning Results This section presents the dimensioning results of applying dimensioning approach (3) proposed in the last section and validates them with simulations (the dimensioning results for approach (1) and (2) are given in Appendix A.18). Approach (3) is considered as a general approach to be applied for dimensioning regardless of the degree of the desired delay factor. In the following presented examples, the simulation scenarios are configured as follows: all users in the network are assigned to the same RAB rate peak = 128 kbps web traffic model: page size is 50 kbyte of a constant distribution there is no restrictions on the number of elastic traffic flows there are 4 Node Bs (last mile links) in the RAN, each generating the same amount of the offered traffic 8.3 Dimensioning for Elastic Traffic in ATM-Based UTRAN In the presented examples, the target end-to-end delay factor ftarget changes from 1.1 to 1.5. With approach (3), the assigned target delay factors for the last mile and the backbone link are equal to (flarget +1)/2 according to the formula (8.6). The offered traffic amount on the last mile is around 1700 kbps. The validation of the applicability of approach (3) is by comparing with simulations. For each link, the bandwidth will be set and adapted until t