Inferring Congestion Sharing and Path Characteristics from Packet Interarrival Times

Abstract

This paper presents new non-intrusive measurement techniques to detect sharing of upstream congestion and discover bottleneck router link speeds. Our techniques are completely passive and require only arrival times of packets and flow identifiers. Our technique for detecting shared congestion is based upon the observation that an aggregated arrival trace from flows that share a bottleneck has very different statistics from those that do not share a bottleneck. In particular the entropy of the inter-arrival times is much lower for aggregated traffic sharing a bottleneck. Additionally this paper identifies mode structure in the inter-arrival distribution that enables discovery of the link bandwidths of multiple upstream routers. We validate