Can Bandwidth Estimation Tackle Noise at Ultra-high Speeds?

While existing bandwidth estimation tools have been shown to perform well on 100Mbps networks, they fail to do so at gigabit and higher network speeds. This is because finer inter-packet gaps are needed to probe for higher rates -- fine gaps are more susceptible to be disturbed by small-scale buffering-related noise. In this paper, we evaluate existing noise reduction techniques for tackling the issue, and show that they are ineffective on 10Gbps links. We propose a novel smoothing strategy, Buffering-aware Spike Smoothing (BASS), which can be applied effectively to both single-rate and multi-rate probing frameworks and help significantly in scaling bandwidth estimation to ultra-high speed networks. Besides, we provide first evidence that accurate bandwidth estimation using our strategy can help improve the performance of congestion-control protocols on real 10Gbps networks.