Measuring bandwidth

Accurate network bandwidth measurement is important to a variety of network applications. Unfortunately, accurate bandwidth measurement is difficult. We describe some current bandwidth measurement techniques: using throughput, and packet pair. We explain some of the problems with these techniques, including poor accuracy, poor scalability, lack of statistical robustness, poor agility in adapting to bandwidth changes, lack of flexibility in deployment, and inaccuracy when used on a variety of traffic types. The authors solutions to these problems include the use of a packet window to adapt quickly to bandwidth changes, receiver only packet pair to combine accuracy and ease of deployment, and potential bandwidth filtering to increase the accuracy. These techniques are at least as accurate as previously used filtering algorithms, and in some situations, they are more than 37% more accurate.