NEPRI: available bandwidth measurement in IP networks

To provide a consistent quality of service in IP networks, it is necessary to know the current performance and available bandwidth of the network adequately. There are some ways to obtain the current available bandwidth such as management information base (MIB) analysis and RMON monitoring. The measurement methods using probing packets are studied, but they require a large number of packets to be transmitted in order to improve the measurement accuracy. They create heavy network traffic, so it is difficult to use such methods for actual networks in use. To solve the problem, we propose a new method called NEPRI. This method detects the macroscopic behaviour of the probing packets queued at the bottleneck and estimates the available bandwidth of the path. We show our method consumes less network resources and is sufficiently accurate.