An end-to-end measurement and monitoring technique for the bottleneck link capacity and its available bandwidth

Abstract

An efficient and accurate measurement technique for the network bandwidths information can be utilized for various areas including the application layer services improvement, congestion control and for the network administration support. For these purposes, we propose an end-to-end measurement and monitoring technique for the bottleneck link capacity and its available bandwidth. This novel technique based on a new packet-pairs scheme figures out and utilizes the path signatures and sampling of the cross traffic density, through which both bandwidth metrics can be obtained from the same measurement data. This feature enables us to measure multi-metrics in a single measurement framework, reducing the probe overhead and the measurement time without causing congestions. We used ns-2 simulations and Internet measurements for the bottleneck link capacity and simulation comparisons for the available bandwidth to evaluate the performance of our proposed methodology. The results showed a high level of accuracy and a short probe time with very low intrusiveness, providing the capability of estimating the dual bandwidth metrics.