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Toward accurate and efficient available bandwidth measurement

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Abstract

The packet-pair technique is the most popular end-based approach for bandwidth measurement. Most packet-pair based proposals use the fluid cross-traffic model to justify the design of their estimation techniques. However, real traffic is certainly not fluid. The consistency of the statistical packet-pair dispersion model in general bursty cross-traffic conditions has still not been fully justified in published research. Furthermore, we note that existing measurement techniques do not take account of the actual measurement variance, which means that they are often subject to significant fluctuations in accuracy. To achieve high accuracy and efficiency in available bandwidth measurement, we contribute analytical insights into packet-pair dispersion techniques by developing a queuing model to describe the impact of the cross-traffic on the packet-pair dispersion under bursty cross-traffic conditions. Based on this model, the consistency of statistical packet-pair dispersion measurement in general cross-traffic conditions is demonstrated and new approaches that help to detect and eliminate the elastic bias caused by measurement variance are presented. We show that the algorithm we developed works correctly on the Internet and offers more dependable measurement results than existing tools.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Communication, Hunan University, Changsha, China

    Jun Liu

  2. School of Software, Hunan University, Changsha, China

    Dafang Zhang

Authors
  1. Jun Liu
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  2. Dafang Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jun Liu.

Additional information

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China with grant no. 90718008, 60673155 and 60703097, and National Basic Research Program of China 2007CB310702.

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Liu, J., Zhang, D. Toward accurate and efficient available bandwidth measurement. Telecommun Syst 41, 211–227 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-009-9145-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-009-9145-1

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