Telecommunication traffic, queueing models, and subexponential distributions

This article reviews various models within the queueing framework which have been suggested for teletraffic data. Such models aim to capture certain stylised features of the data, such as variability of arrival rates, heavy-tailedness of on- and off-periods and long-range dependence in teletraffic transmission. Subexponential distributions constitute a large class of heavy-tailed distributions, and we investigate their (sometimes disastrous) influence within teletraffic models. We demonstrate some of the above effects in an explorative data analysis of Munich Universities' intranet data.