Schemes to measure available bandwidth and link capacity with ternary search and compound probe for packet networks

Accurate measurement of network parameters such as available bandwidth (ABW) and link capacity are needed for analyzing network performance. Active measurement is an attractive approach as it has the advantage of controllability and flexibility for performing network measurement. However, it can affect both the data traffic and the measurement process itself, affecting the accuracy of the measurement if significant amount of probe traffic is injected into the network. Furthermore, measurement must be completed in short time to effectively monitor the network state. In this paper, we present two new measurement schemes: one for measuring ABW, and the other for measuring per-hop link capacities of an end-to-end path. The ABW measurement scheme performs measurement in short period of time and with small amount of probe traffic, and it achieves accuracy comparable to that of IGI and Pathload. The link-capacity measurement scheme provides immunity to cross traffic. We present ns-2 simulation results of the ABW and link-capacity measurement schemes to show their performance.