rt-Winf: Real time wireless inference mechanism

This paper presents a new method to estimate the available bandwidth and the path capacity over a wireless network path, denoted as rt-Winf. The estimation is performed in real-time and without the need to intrusively inject packets in the network. This is accomplished by resorting to the CSMA-CA scheme with RTS/CTS packets to determine each node´s channel allocation. rt-Winf repeatedly samples the available bandwidth of the network path, requiring little computation in each iteration, and being lightweight with respect to memory requirements. rt-Winf has been tested both in the CMU Wireless Emulator and the ns-2 simulator, using ad-hoc, infrastructure and mesh networks scenarios. The results obtained through the comparison of rt-Winf with current state of the art approaches show that rt-Winf obtains the available bandwidth and capacity estimation with the highest accuracy and without introducing overhead traffic in the network.