Erlang

(communications) A unit of communication traffic load, equal to the traffic load whose calls, if placed end to end, will keep one path continuously occupied.

(1) A unit of measurement of telephone traffic. It is equal to one hour of conversation (3,600 seconds or 36 CCS). Named after the Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang, it also specifies the approximate number of trunks in use; for example, if the traffic in a call center is 8.5 Erlangs in one hour, more than 8 trunks were used in that hour. See CCS.

(2) An open source programming language specialized for concurrent processing (multiprocessing) on Unix-based and Windows computers. Originally developed by Ericsson and named after A. K. Erlang (see definition #1 above) as well as "Ericsson Language," Erlang makes programming threads easier to write than in traditional languages. Developed in the late 1980s, Erlang was modeled after concurrent languages such as Ada and Modula and functional languages such as ML and Miranda. For more information, visit www.erlang.org and www.erlang.se. See thread and multithreading.

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[Etymology: A. K. Erlang; Denmark 1879-1924] telecommunications. Symbol E. A measure of telephone traffic load on a multi-channel route, effectively the mean number of simultaneous calls. Used equivalently with estimated demand for planning, a value of 0.7 per channel often being regarded as maximal for tolerable service quality. Sometimes considered as total call minutes per hour on a route, with 42 (= 60 × 0.7) erlangs per channel maximal for fair likelihood of a caller finding the circuit free. For data transmission over a leased circuit the erlangs of load equal the seconds of activity per hour divided by 3 600.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a unit of traffic intensity in a telephone system

Erlang may refer to:

• Agner Krarup Erlang (1878 – 1929), a mathematician and engineer after whom several concepts are named
  • Erlang (unit), a unit to measure traffic in telecommunications or other domains
  • Erlang distribution, a probability distribution describing the time between events
• Erlang (programming language), a programming language oriented to developing concurrent software
• Erlang Shen, a Chinese deity

See also

• Erlangen, Germany
• Erlanger (disambiguation)

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