ABdis: Approach to Estimating the Distribution of Available Bandwidth for Multimedia QoS Control and Management

Hiroki NISHIKAWA
Takuya ASAKA
Tatsuro TAKAHASHI

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E89-B    No.2    pp.364-372
Publication Date: 2006/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e89-b.2.364
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Multimedia QoS Evaluation and Management Technologies)
Category: 
Keyword: 
available bandwidth,  active measurement,  

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Summary: 
This paper proposes ABdis, a new active measurement method for estimating the available bandwidth on a communication network path. Due to the recent explosion in multimedia applications, it is becoming increasingly important to manage network QoS, and tools that can measure network quality precisely are necessary to do this. Many conventional active measurement methods/tools, however, can measure/estimate only the average of the available bandwidth in a given period but cannot measure its distribution. If the distribution of the bandwidth over short intervals can be measured, the information would be useful for network management, proxy selection, and end-to-end admission control. We propose an end-to-end active measurement method called ABdis, which can estimate the distribution of the available bandwidth in a network path. ABdis employs multiple probes having different rates and a parameter-matching technique for estimating distribution. Furthermore, we present the results of simulations and verify ABdis's performance under various conditions by changing probe parameters, amount of cross traffic, and network models.