Measuring Bandwidth Signatures of Network Paths

Overview

This paper proposes a practical and efficient technique, Forecaster, to estimate the end-to-end available bandwidth, and the speed of the most congested (tight) link along an Internet path. Forecaster is practical since it does not assume any a priori knowledge about the measured path, does not make any simplifying assumptions about the nature of cross-traffic, does not assume the ability to capture accurate packet dispersions or packet queueing delays, and does not try to preserve inter-packet spacing along path segments. It merely relies on a simple binary test to estimate whether each probe packet has queued in the network or not.