Available bandwidth probing in hybrid home networks

A number of studies show that most of current probing tools, for available bandwidth, exhibit low accuracy, and slow convergence in Home Networks. Some reasons of this behavior include the high queuing variability of probing flows, which is induced by multiple-access mechanisms, time-variant capacity links of hybrid paths, and the instability of beta probing tools. Considering these constrains of the measurement process and the limitations of probing-tools, this paper proposes using Iperf in a lightweight mode to obtain maximum throughput of non-disruptive TCP flows to estimate the available bandwidth. Our experimental results show that Iperf doubles the accuracy of the estimates compared with IGI/PTR, Pathchirp and Wbest, on representative hybrid paths. We also show that due to the low bandwidth delay products (BDP), of home network paths, we can keep low overhead using TCP flows with convenient probing/polling intervals, which reduces the intrusiveness associated to the default Iperf usage.