End-to-End Measurement of Hop-by-Hop Available Bandwidth

Existing techniques for measuring available bandwidth measure the available bandwidth at bottlenecks along the path, and most of them do not specify the bottleneck location. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end measurement method for the hop-by-hop available bandwidth along a network path. Such a technique can facilitate advanced traffic control, especially in heterogeneous network environments. The proposed method assumes a situation where intermediate routers can record the arrival and departure times of incoming packets as timestamps in the packets themselves. The end host sends probe packets at various rates and estimates the available bandwidth at each network section using the incoming and outgoing rates of packets calculated from intermediate timestamps, based on statistical processing under a fluid traffic model. We present extensive simulation results for the proposed method and confirm that it can accurately measure the available bandwidth of each section along the network path even when the available bandwidth of the sender-side network is smaller than that of the receiver-side network.