BPB: A method for transparently obtaining network path characteristics close to the sender

Due to the growth of unresponsive UDP traffic in the Internet, it becomes increasingly important for ISPs to amply shape the traffic that leaves their network. Ideally, flows should be forced to be TCP-friendly; to this end, knowledge about certain end-to-end path characteristics is needed. We present a suitable mechanism (the Burst-PiggyBack (BPB) technique) that obtains the necessary information at a device that is located close to the sender without requiring any changes at the communicating peers or in routers. The method’s hypothesis is that an injected probe packet at the end of a burst is treated similar to the burst. The results acquired from simulations showed strong correlations between the loss rate and the RTT of bursts and probe packets.