Multicast active probing measurement technique

In this paper, we extend unicast resource measurement techniques to multicast environment to estimate bottleneck link bandwidth. We show that path segment measurement is more suitable to multicast environment, more robust than full path measurement, and reduces error probability of estimating network resources. We also introduce a novel way to measure end-to-end queuing delay by using a pair of packets with different priorities. The proposed scheme doesn't require time synchronization and doesn't need to communicate with core routers. Our approach is edge-based scheme. Measurements are made at each potential receiver at the network edge, and can be easily implemented in various networks. We have evaluated and compared our scheme with other existed resource measurement approaches through a set of OPNET simulation experiments.