Empirical evaluation of capacity estimation tools

Bandwidth estimation is an important task because the knowledge of the bandwidth of a path is useful in a wide variety of contexts. Clients, applications and servers benefit greatly from knowing the bandwidth of a route. In this paper we describe and discuss experiments carried out to provide bandwidth estimates using five tools: bprobe, clink, nettimer pathrate, and pchar The tools are evaluated and compared according to the criteria accuracy, statistical robustness and time to estimation. We show several results for short and long network paths. The topologies tested include links which capacities range from 2 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s.