End-to-end available bandwidth estimation tools, an experimental comparison

Abstract. The available bandwidth of a network path impacts the per-formance of many applications, such as VoIP calls, video streaming and P2P content distribution systems. Several tools for bandwidth estimation have been proposed in the last years but there is still uncertainty in their accuracy and efficiency under different network conditions. Although a number of experimental evaluations have been carried out in order to compare some of these methods, a comprehensive evaluation of all the existing active tools for available bandwidth estimation is still missing. This article introduces an empirical comparison of most of the active esti-mation tools actually implemented and freely available nowadays. Abing, ASSOLO, DietTopp, IGI, pathChirp, Pathload, PTR, Spruce and Yaz have been compared in a controlled environment and in presence of dif-ferent sources of cross-traffic. The performance of each tool has been investigated in terms of accuracy, time and traffic injected into the net-work to perform an estimation.