In this chapter, the authors examine two important network traffic issues: estimation of effective bandwidth and data loss probability in communication networks. They focus on estimation approaches based on network traffic modeling. Initially, they review some concepts related to network traffic modeling such as monofractal and multifractal properties. Further, they address the issue of estimating the effective bandwidth for network traffic flows. Besides effective bandwidth, the knowledge of the loss probability explicitly allows us to guarantee some QoS parameters required by the traffic flows, for example, by discarding flows with intolerable byte loss rate. In this sense, the authors present an overview of loss probability estimation methods including an approach that considers multifractal characteristics of network traffic. That is, given the model parameters, the data loss probability for network traffic can be directly computed. They conclude that both the multifractal based effective bandwidth and loss probability estimation methods can be powerful tools for really providing QoS to network flows.

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