Measuring bandwidth between PlanetLab nodes

Abstract

With the lack of end-to-end QoS guarantees on existing networks, applications that require certain performance levels resort to periodic measurements of network paths. Typical metrics of interest are latency, bandwidth and loss rates. While the latency metric has been the focus of many research studies, the bandwidth metric has received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we report our bandwidth measurements between PlanetLab nodes and analyze various trends and insights from the data. For this work, we assessed the capabilities of several existing bandwidth measurement tools and describe the difficulties in choosing suitable tools as well as using them on PlanetLab. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.