AProbing: Estimating available bandwidth using ACK pair probing

Available bandwidth estimation is an effective way to understand the situations of networks and applications. The packet pair technique analyzes the inter-arrival time of packet pair for the available bandwidth estimation in an end-to-end path. The inter-arrival time of packet pair is mostly caused by the queuing delay of narrow link which is sensitive to cross traffic. This paper proposes a new method using ACK pair probing (AProbing) to estimate end-to-end available bandwidth. It improves the packet pair technique with the probe gap model (PGM) which reduces the influences of cross traffic, and reconstructs the acknowledgements (ACKs) of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which reduces the overhead of measurement. AProbing has been implemented and verified in NS-3. The simulation results show that the accuracy of AProbing is similar with that of Pathload and 10% higher than the accuracies of Pathchirp and Cprobe. Moreover, AProbing significantly decreases the overhead of bandwidth estimation compared with these existed methods.