Bandwidth Estimation for Network Quality of Service Management

Estimation of Available Bandwidth (AB) for an end-to-end network path allows traffic sources to judiciously regulate the volume of application traffic injected into the network. Bandwidth estimation between two red-black network boundary nodes can enable efficient admission control of new sessions and congestion control of existing sessions through the black network. In this paper we have modified two bandwidth efficient AB estimation mechanisms - ProbeGap and Resource Friendly Bandwidth Estimation (RFBE), and evaluated their performance over a crypto-partitioned red-black network. ProbeGap has been augmented with skew compensation and bunching of probe packets to yield better estimation results. RFBE has been completely modified and the fast packet classification is based on inter-arrival times of probe packets at sender and receiver, since the results using the originally proposed method were affected by clock-skew between sender and receiver.