The primary objective of this book is to introduce the theory and practice of traffic engineering and queueing. It is a step-by-step guide to the principles of traffic management and quality of service (QoS) for network designers, network managers, and end users. As such, it covers integrated voice, video and data networking, QoS, and traffic management for IP and ATM networking technologies. It is appropriate for all users, from beginners to intermediate users to experts. It is also a reference book that will help engineers and managers solve real networking problems.

The book is organized into seven parts, each of which contains three chapters that cover their material at different levels of difficulty. Each part begins with a chapter addressed to nontechnical readers. In these introductory chapters, the author uses analogies with real life to illustrate important items. Successive chapters within each part are more difficult and use mathematical tools to describe the ideas presented. The second chapter of each part addresses practicing engineers and managers who commonly use spreadsheets and macro languages. Each part’s third chapter is the most technical, addressing students or specialists in mathematics, communications engineering, or computer science.

Part 1, “Traffic Management in Communication Networks,” introduces QoS and traffic management in IP and ATM networks, and defines basic terms and concepts used in traffic management.

Part 2, “Quality of Service (QoS) and Traffic Control,” covers the basics of QoS and discusses the techniques that IP and ATM networks use to deliver the required quality for a specific level of traffic.

Part 3, “The Traffic Phenomenon,” provides a probabilistic mathematical technique for computing the quality of traffic delivered based on a network’s specific design. It explains the statistically predictable effect of random traffic in performance based on mathematical models, and includes spreadsheet formulas and functions to compute numerical results.

Part 4, “Queueing Principles,” introduces queueing theory, which can serve as a toolkit with which to analyze the performance of IP and ATM networks. It also describes important QoS measures in a network (such as delay and loss).

Part 5, “Congestion Detection and Control,” focuses on network performances and the effects generated by the unpredictable phenomenon of congestion. Some methods for controlling congestion are also presented here.

Part 6, “Routing and Network Design,” analyzes the routing process, presents some routing algorithms, and analyzes the performance of network routing models.

Part 7, “Putting It All Together,” introduces additional networking techniques involved in the design of large networks and presents some additional material on network design. An interesting subject covered in this part is dynamic routing, and specifically a comparison between dynamic routing and static routing. The last part ends with some speculations about the possible future of QoS and traffic management in IP and ATM networks.

This book’s layout is very good. Many graphs and schemas reinforce the theoretical material and clarify some results of mathematical expositions. Some of the results are listed in Excel format, and the Excel spreadsheets are available on the Internet. Useful bibliographic references are provided, but the index is poor.

There are also some technical errors in the book. The excellent, logical organization will interest a broad audience, but the book’s language is very technical; I think simpler language would have been better.

I recommend the book to network administrators and engineers with network backgrounds. Beginners can read the introductory chapters of each part to gain a general idea of networking traffic problems.