We observe currently a fast evolution of web, multimedia, and especially peer-to-peer applications. This evolution yields a rapidly changing load environment for the transport of data streams subject to severe Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. Considering the needs for traffic planning and QoS assessment in wired and wireless access, as well as backbone networks, issues like load modeling and traffic characterization by thorough statistical techniques have to be addressed as the first basic steps of teletraffic engineering. For this purpose, new and reliable traffic measurement, modeling, and estimation techniques are required to accurately determine the traffic load and the resource usage in wired and wireless networks. The goal of this chapter consists in providing a comprehensive overview on related activities within the COST 279 action. Its structure reflects natural steps of obtaining results: traffic measurement, which concerns rather technical issues related to the collection of traffic and its statistics; traffic characterization, to provide a rather qualitative desciption of traffic behavior; traffic modeling, to provide a rather quantitative description with focus on models and their parameters; and traffic estimation, which is about inference and prediction of traffic volumes based on observations.

Detta är en översikt över COST 279 aktionens aktiviteter hittils (dvs till aktionens midpunktsseminar) med hänsyn till mätningar, karakterisering, modellering och estimering av trafik i kommunikationsnät (mest Internet).