Comparison of Available Bandwidth Estimation Techniques in Packet-Switched Mobile Networks

The relative contribution of the transport network towards the per-user capacity in mobile telecommunication systems is becoming very important due to the ever increasing air-interface data rates. Thus, resource management procedures such as admission, load and handover control can make use of information regarding the available bandwidth in the transport network, as it could end up being the bottleneck rather than the air interface. This paper provides a comparative study of three well known available bandwidth estimation techniques, i.e. TOPP, SLoPS and pathChirp, taking into account the statistical conditions of the available bandwidth and assessing the variability of their estimations. Simulation-based studies on a mobile transport network show that pathChirp outperforms TOPP and SLoPS, both in terms of accuracy and efficiency