c
 





c
In telecommunications, 
  



(c) is a teletraffic engineering
measurement used to evaluate and plan capacity for telephone networks. BHCA is the number of
telephone calls attempted at the busiest hour of the day (peak hour), and the higher the BHCA,
the higher the stress on the network processors. BHCA is not to be confused with busy hour call
completion (BHCC) which measures the throughput capacity of the network. If a bottleneck in
the network exists with a capacity lower than the estimated BHCA, then congestion will occur
resulting in many failed calls and customer dissatisfaction.

BHCA is usually used when planning telephone switching capacities and frequently goes side by
side with the Erlang unit capacity calculation. As an example, a telephone exchange with a
capacity of one million BHCA is estimated to handle 250,000 subscribers. The overall
calculation is more complex however, and involves accounting for available circuits, desired
blocking rates, and Erlang capacity allocated to each subscriber.

c
 
 

  
  
 

    
      
 
    






 is the loss or reduction in signal strength over a certain distance. In the case of optical
fiber, this is measured in decibels per kilometer (dB/km). When first developed, optical fiber handled
attenuation of less than 20 dB per km. Now, typical attenuation is 0.35 dB per km at a wavelength of
1310 nanometers (nm) and even lower at 1550 km (0.25 dB per km).

Several factors lead to increased attenuation, primarily scattering and dispersion. Molecular
irregularities in the glass cause the light to scatter. Further attenuation is caused by light being
absorbed by residual materials, such as metal and water ions. It is recommended to buy a fiber cable
that has a low water loss to try to prevent as much attenuation as possible.

º  

In optics,    is a phenomenon that causes the separation of a wave into spectral components
with different frequencies, due to a dependence of the wave's speed on its frequency. During the
process of digital transmission, dispersion can limit the maximum data rate, maximum distance, or the
information-carrying capacity of the single-mode fiber. With analog transmission, dispersion can
create unacceptable levels of composite second-order distortion (CSO).

º


This describes the size of the light-carrying part of fiber, including the core and a small part of the
cladding glass for single-mode fibers. Mode-field diameter (MFD) is important to note because it is a
performance parameter that can determine the effect of bend-induced loss as well as splice loss.
Rather than being only the core diameter, MFD is a function of wavelength, the aforementioned core
diameter, and the refractive-index
Œ

μ
Œ

 
Œ and Œ

 Πare
standardized multiplexing protocols that transfer multiple digital bit streams over optical fiber
using lasers or light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Lower data rates can also be transferred via an
electrical interface. The method was developed to replace the Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy
(PDH) system for transporting larger amounts of telephone calls and data traffic over the same
fiber without synchronization problems. SONET generic criteria are detailed in Telcordia
Technologies Generic Requirements document GR-253-CORE.[1] Generic criteria applicable to
SONET and other transmission systems (e.g., asynchronous fiber optic systems or digital radio
systems) are found in Telcordia GR-499-CORE.[2]

SONET and SDH, which are essentially the same, were originally designed to transport circuit
mode communications (e.g., DS1, DS3) from a variety of different sources, but they were
primarily designed to support real-time, uncompressed, circuit-switched voice encoded in PCM
format.[3] The primary difficulty in doing this prior to SONET/SDH was that the synchronization
sources of these various circuits were different. This meant that each circuit was actually
operating at a slightly different rate and with different phase. SONET/SDH allowed for the
simultaneous transport of many different circuits of differing origin within a single framing
protocol. SONET/SDH is not itself a communications protocol ÷
 , but a transport protocol.

Due to SONET/SDH's essential protocol neutrality and transport-oriented features, SONET/SDH

was the obvious choice for transporting Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) frames. It quickly
evolved mapping structures and concatenated payload containers to transport ATM connections.
In other words, for ATM (and eventually other protocols such as Ethernet), the internal complex
structure previously used to transport circuit-oriented connections was removed and replaced
with a large and concatenated frame (such as OC-3c) into which ATM cells, IP packets, or
Ethernet frames are placed.

Both SDH and SONET are widely used today: SONET in the United States and Canada, and
SDH in the rest of the world. Although the SONET standards were developed before SDH, it is
considered a variation of SDH because of SDH's greater worldwide market penetration.