Estimating Available Capacity of a Network Connection

Abstract — Capacity measures for a network connection across the Internet can be useful to many applications. Its applicability encompasses QoS guarantees, congestion control and other related areas. In this paper, we define and measure the available capacity of a connection, through observations at endpoints only. Our measurements account for variability of cross traffic that pass through the routers handling this connection. Related to the estimation of available capacity, we suggest modifications to current techniques to measure packet service time of the ‘bottleneck ’ router of the connection. Finally, we present estimation results on widearea network connections from our experiments to multiple sites. I