A Min-Plus System Interpretation of Bandwidth Estimation

Significant research has been dedicated to methods that estimate the available bandwidth in a network from traffic measurements. While estimation methods abound, less progress has been made on achieving a foundational understanding of the bandwidth estimation problem. In this paper, we develop a min-plus system theoretic formulation of bandwidth estimation. We show that the problem as well as previously proposed solutions can be concisely described and derived using min-plus system theory, thus establishing the existence of a strong link between network calculus and network probing methods. We relate difficulties in network probing to potential non-linearities of the underlying systems, and provide a justification for the distinctive treatment of FIFO scheduling in network probing.