Performance comparison of different techniques for available bandwidth measurement in packet switched network

As variety of applications and services that can be provided on packet switched networks has strongly increased over the last years and keeps on increasing, the need for an accurate network monitoring has become an important challenge to be dealt with accurately. Among the different parameters that can be considered for the traffic monitoring on a path, this paper focuses on the attention on the available bandwidth. Three different techniques and related software implementations aimed at measuring available bandwidth are taken into consideration. The purpose of this work is to provide a performance comparison of the three techniques under different operating conditions. To this aim, a proper measurement station has been set up by the authors.