Erlang (unit)

Common card · No. 388991

The erlang (symbol E) is a dimensionless unit that is used in telephony as a measure of offered load or carried load on service-providing elements such as telephone circuits or telephone switching equipment. A single cord circuit has the capacity to be used for 60 minutes in one hour. Full utilization of that capacity, 60 minutes of traffic, constitutes 1 erlang. Carried traffic in erlangs is the average number of concurrent calls measured over a given period (often one hour), while offered traffic is the traffic that would be carried if all call-attempts succeeded. How much offered traffic is carried in practice will depend on what happens to unanswered calls when all servers are busy. The CCITT named the international unit of telephone traffic the erlang in 1946 in honor of Agner Krarup Erlang. In Erlang's analysis of efficient telephone line usage, he derived the formulae for two important cases, Erlang-B and Erlang-C, which became foundational results in teletraffic engineering and...

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