A new available bandwidth measurement method based on ImTCP

We propose a method to measure available network bandwidth using the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). The recently proposed ImTCP technique uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) data packets and the corresponding acknowledgement responses to measure the available bandwidth between sender and receiver. Since ImTCP needs to change the sender´s TCP implementation, it needs modifications to sender´s operating system kernel. Moreover, ImTCP cannot measure available bandwidth accurately if the receiver sends delayed acknowledgments. These problems stem from the use of TCP. In this paper, we discuss an ICMP-based method that overcomes these limitations. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method in an experimental network and show that it generates less measurement traffic and requires less time for bandwidth measurement than PathLoad. We also show that proposed method can measure the available bandwidth even if the bandwidth changes during measurement.