A new method for measuring the bottleneck bandwidth

Measuring the bottleneck bandwidth of a path is useful to many applications. The existing tools to measure the network bottleneck bandwidth are mostly based on the packet pair technique. But the intrinsic error exists in packet pair technique due to the effect of the data link layer, and the incorrect results obtained by the filter algorithm when the network load is heavy. To resolve these problems, we put forward a new technique called packet tetrad. Because of the differentiate relation between the two packet pairs in a packet tetrad, the disturbance of the data link layer may be eliminated. So the packet tetrad technique has the high accuracy on measurement. The results of simulating measurements under ns-2 environment show that the packet tetrad mode has more robustness than the packet pair technique had.