Survey of Bandwidth Estimation Techniques in Communication Networks

Increased popularity and wealth-creation potential of conventional mobile phones, smart phones and tablet computers resulted in the unprecedented penetration of wired and wireless communications. Most of such real-time applications require video streaming that needs quality of service (QoS) provisioning in addition to good end-to-end transport performance in network infrastructure. Estimating the reliability of an end-to-end network path is critically important for such applications. Available bandwidth at a node is an important QoS characteristic of the path that is a minimum spare capacity of links constituting a network path. Researchers have proposed various techniques for estimating the bandwidth to increase the network throughput. In the past, bandwidth estimation (BE) techniques developed for wired networks are focused on point-to point dedicated links that are not directly usable in wireless networks. The reason is that these techniques are based on models which are no longer valid in wireless environment. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the BE techniques proposed till date by researchers in the literature for both wired and wireless networks. We have categorized the BE techniques into four main categories as active probing techniques, passive techniques, techniques only for wireless networks and other BE techniques. A brief outline of each technique is discussed which includes the problem statement, operation methodology, results and applications. Techniques in each category have been compared using various parameters such as accuracy, BE time and overhead.