A simple like-utilization estimation scheme based on RTT measurement

This paper proposes a scheme based on Round-Trip Time (RTT) measurement to estimate link utilization. In conventional active measurement schemes, probe packets are temporarily transmitted at greater than the available bandwidth through the link under test to estimate its utilization rate. This degrades the quality of communication for existing traffic passing through the link. In the proposed scheme, two RTTs are measured from a source host to both end nodes of a targeted link to obtain their probability distribution functions; the bandwidth used by the probe packets is much smaller than that available. The link utilization rate is estimated by deconvoluting the measured RTT values. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme estimates link utilization with an accuracy of 10% while not degrading existing traffic and follows time-varying link utilization on the second time scale.