On Fast Estimation of Network Bandwidth

摘要

Several tools are available to measure the bandwidth of an Internet link. However, these tools are found to be a bit slow since they send a large amount of probe packets to estimate not only the bandwidth of an Internet link, but also aim to find other characteristics of the link. In addition, these tools are not adaptable towards traffic conditions such as congestion. They send only a fixed number of probe packets in all situations, which often yield an inaccurate result on the actual bandwidth itself. In this work, we present a regression-based, iterative technique to filter out queue delays from all measured roundtrip times; this is done in order to estimate the bandwidth of a link along an Internet path. The technique can be used in existing ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) protocol based tools or on any tool that sends probe packets to measure roundtrip times to estimate the bandwidth. We test the proposed technique on the links along an Internet path. Our test results show that the proposed scheme is faster than the existing schemes and requires significantly fewer probe packets to achieve similar accuracy.