Bandwidth estimation in mobile networks by busy period detection

In the recent years, a significant research effort has been devoted to the development of bandwidth estimation techniques and tools due to the broad range of possible applications. The vast majority of bandwidth estimation algorithms are designed and optimized for wired networks. Therefore, these solutions not only provide inaccurate results in wireless environments but also rely on some information usually not known in advance or produce a severe additional load on the network. Specifically, in mobile networks the continuously varying characteristics of radio links make it an extreme challenge to estimate the currently available bandwidth. In this paper we present a bandwidth estimation method worked out for mobile networks, which models the dynamics of the bottleneck queue and identifies its busy periods. Our algorithm can estimate the unused bandwidth by exploiting the user-generated downlink network traffic with negligible extra load. The operation of the algorithm is demonstrated on real traffic traces captured by a mobile device in a 3G network.