ABwE :A Practical Approach to Available Bandwidth Estimation

Abstract

Abstract—We report on a new tool developed for monitoring available bandwidth in the range from several Mbits/s to 1000 Mbits/s. The tool is based on the packet pair dispersion technique. It has been in experimental use at SLAC for several months and it has been demonstrated at iGrid2002 and SC2002. It can be used for detecting bandwidth changes caused by routing or congestions. We have studied the influence of cross traffic and the behavior of routers on the delay of the probing packets. The paper presents part of these analyses together with results from monitoring of 12 paths in US, Japan and in Europe. Index Terms—available bandwidth, dispersion technique, packet-pairs, high-throughput, measurement tools, monitoring, networks, tuning, TCP.