Internet Available Bandwidth Measurement And Measurement Systems

Bandwidth is an important resource in Internet, and it is also a key factor in many network technologies. Available bandwidth estimation is of interest to users who wish to understand the behavior of the network deeply and optimize the end-to-end transport performance. The ever-increasing size and complexity of Internet imposes a higher demand on available bandwidth estimation.This paper presents ITP, a new active probing algorithm for the estimation of available bandwidth on a communication network path, after summarizing current available bandwidth estimation technologies. ITP features an exponential flight pattern of probes, which is different from current probing schemes based on packet pairs or packet trains. By rapidly increasing the probing rate within each probing train, ITP obtains a rich set of information to dynamically estimate the available bandwidth. Since it uses only packet inter-arrival times for estimation, ITP does not require synchronous clocks between the sender and receiver. We test ITP and find that it provides good estimate of the available bandwidth while using only a fraction of probe bytes that current state-of-the-art technologies use.Furthermore, this paper describes SABMS, an available bandwith measurement architecture based on the experience got in Paxson's NPD project, which is used to figure out the available bandwith related information well and truly on Internet. A key design goal SABMS is scalability to potentially thousands of probes within a single infrastructure. As the number of probes increases, the number of available measurable paths increases via N-squared effect, potentially allowing for a global view of Internet's available bandwidth. The system is composed of three kinds of network nodes, PP, PPC, and MC. PP is used to execute the actual measurement using ITP; PPC acts as the administrative center of the system; MC is the client. SABMS differs with Surveyor, Felix mainly in two points: (1) multiple control hosts rather than one;(2) different users are given different access rights to the probe points.