A Combined Methodology for Measurement of Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in Wired Packet Networks

Accurate measurement of network parameters such as available bandwidth, link capacity, delay, packet loss and jitter are used to support and monitor several network functions, e.g., traffic engineering, Quality-of-Service (QoS) routing, end-to-end transport performance optimization, and link capacity planning. However, proactive network measurement schemes can impact both the data traffic and the measurement process itself, affecting the accuracy of the estimation if a significant amount of probe traffic is injected into the network. In this work, we propose two measurement schemes, one for measuring available bandwidth and the other for measuring link capacity, both of them use a combination of data probe packets and Internet Control Messaging Protocol (ICMP) packets. Our schemes perform available-bandwidth and link-capacity measurements in a short time and with a small amount of probe traffic. We show a performance study of our measurement schemes and compare their accuracy to those of other existing measurement schemes. We show that the proposed schemes achieve shorter convergence time than other existing schemes and high accuracy