Estimating Link Capacity in High Speed Networks

Knowledge of bottleneck capacity of an Internet path is critical for efficient network design, management, and usage. With emerging high speed Internet links, most traditional estimation techniques are limited in providing fast and accurate capacity estimations. In this paper, we propose a new technique, called PBProbe, to estimate high speed links. PBProbe is based on CapProbe; however, instead of solely relying on packet pairs, PBProbe employs a “packet bulk” technique and adapts the bulk length in order to overcome the well known problem with packet pair based approaches, namely the lack of accurate timer resolution. As a result, PBProbe not only preserves the simplicity and speed of CapProbe, but it also correctly estimates link capacities within a much larger range. Using analysis, we evaluate PBProbe with various bulk lengths and network configurations. We then perform emulation and Internet experiments to verify the accuracy and speed of PBProbe on high speed links. The results show that PBProbe is consistently fast and accurate in the great majority of test cases.