Measuring available bandwidth of multiple parts on end-to-end network path

Abstract

The available bandwidth on an end-to-end network path is an important metric for detecting network congestion, adapting transmission rate, configuring paths and topologies on overlay networks, and so on. The existing available bandwidth measurement techniques aimed only at knowing available bandwidth of the bottleneck part on the path and most of them do not specify where is the bottleneck, and they do not measure available bandwidth of each part of the path separately. Also, they can not measure available bandwidth of multiple parts on the path. In this paper, we propose a simultaneous measurement method of available bandwidth of multiple parts on an end-to-end network path. The proposed method estimates the available bandwidth based on changes in packet sending and arrival intervals under the situation where intermediate routers on the path can record time on incoming packets as a timestamps. We present extensive simulation results of the proposed method and confirm that it can accurately measure available bandwidth of each part on the path even when the available bandwidth of the sender-side network is smaller than that of the receiver-side network.