A new approach to the bottleneck bandwidth measurement for an end-to-end network path

We propose a new technique for measuring the bottleneck bandwidth of a network path between end hosts. Our proposal is based on the packet-pair technique and uses a simple statistical procedure for filtering out the cross traffic effect. We explain the basic mechanism of our proposal and its implementation in two different types of tools, single end-point and double end-point tools. The former runs in one end-point of the path, assuming that the other end-point or intermediate routers should reply to each received packet using ICMP (Internet control message protocol) packets. The latter works under the cooperation of both source and destination hosts. We have extensively conducted several experiments on nationwide and international networks to show that our proposal outperforms existing tools, such as Pathchar and Nettimer, in terms of accuracy and robustness of measurement.