Measuring Internet Bottlenecks: Location, Capacity, and Available Bandwidth

Abstract

The ability to measure the location, capacity and available bandwidth of bottleneck in end-to-end network path is of major importance in congestion control, streaming applications, quality-of-service, overlay network and traffic engineering. Existing algorithms either fail to measure all the three bottleneck properties, or generate a large amount of probing packets. In addition, they often require deployment in both end hosts. A novel technique, called BNeck, is presented in this paper. It allows end users to efficiently and accurately measure the three bottleneck properties. The key idea of BNeck is that the per-link dispersion of probing packet train can be applied to measure the properties of congested links. The accuracy and efficiency of BNeck have been verified with elaborately designed simulation. The simulation result indicates that various applications can adopt BNeck to probe for the three bottleneck properties without loss of performance.