Estimating end-to-end available bandwidth with single end host

Abstract

Measuring available bandwidth of an end-to-end network path has become a crucial operation in traffic engineering, congestion control, quality-of-service, and streaming applications. We present SOProbe, an active probing method of measuring the available bandwidth with only source host instead of intermediate routers or destination host on the targeted path. Equipped with SOProbe, one can unlimitedly measure available bandwidth of any path starting from his network nodes. The basic idea of SOProbe is to search for a narrow rate range in which the available bandwidth resides. To do this, SOProbe sends probing packets at different rates, and it monitors the dispersion of these packets on all links along the path to identify whether the available bandwidth is higher than the probing rates. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.