Available bandwidth measurement using Poisson probing on the Internet

In this paper, we investigated a non-intrusive probing methodology for available bandwidth measurement based on the analysis of the departure process of an active Poisson probing stream. Unlike the self-congestion based available bandwidth measurement, non intrusive techniques are meant to infer the available bandwidth along a path without congesting the path. We propose to probe the end-to-end path using small size packets with exponentially distributed time between consecutive probing packets. Of particular interest to our investigations, is the squared coefficient of variation (SCV) of the inter-departure process of the probing stream. The Internet is modelled as single server queue with two concurrent streams, the probing traffic stream and the cross traffic, we rely on the results on M₁ + M₂/GI_i/1 queueing system and a heavy traffic approximation model to analyze the departure process of the probing stream. Thus, in a real measurement system, given the measured SCV of the probing stream, inverting the approximation helps inferring the load of the cross traffic on an end-to-end-path.