PathMon, a methodology for determining available bandwidth over an unknown network

Abstract

Interest in measuring available bandwidth has increased in response to the need for fast, accurate, non-intrusive estimation of current network conditions. Several methods have been proposed in recent years with varying degrees of success. This paper presents the details of the algorithm and implementation of PathMon, an active probe method which requires no prior knowledge of the network and no management control over the network to provide an end-to-end measurement of available bandwidth. In comparison to other available bandwidth methods, experiments show that PathMon is more accurate, and converges more quickly with less overhead.