M-Perf: An available bandwidth estimation tool for multicast applications

In this paper, we present M-Perf, a tool to estimate the total available bandwidth to each receiver in a multicast session where total available bandwidth is defined as the maximum flow rate from the source to the receiver in a given directed acyclic graph. M-Perf achieves this objective using a technique called network coding. Therefore, unlike end-to-end bandwidth estimation tools, M-Perf requires support from forwarding nodes. Such support is easily available for application layer multicasts in overlay networks. It may also become available in the future for network layer multicast through lower layer support for network coding. We show that M-Perf accurately estimates the available bandwidth using two overlay networks: local-area overlay at University of Wisconsin and wide-area overlay on Planetlab [1]. We also integrate M-Perf into a multimedia streaming application to demonstrate a usage case scenario and further evaluate its effectiveness.