Method and device for robust real-time estimation of the bottleneck bandwidth in the internet

Abstract

A method and device for estimating the bottleneck bandwidth over a communication network is provided. The method includes the steps of: transmission by the sever through a bottleneck link a plurality of bursts comprised of packets to the client; calculating a set of bandwidth samples for each burst received by the client end; determining a new bottleneck bandwidth from the calculated bandwidth samples for the following transmission of data packets between the server and the client. The device capable of estimating a bottleneck bandwidth includes: a means for transmitting a plurality of bursts comprised of packets; a means for receiving each burst packets via a bottleneck link; a means for generating a set of bandwidth samples based on a difference between an inter-packet spacing between the first and the last packet within each burst; and, a means for determining the current bottleneck bandwidth from the generated bandwidth samples.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates to the field of the Internet. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for estimating the bottleneck bandwidth of an Internet system in real time. Background technique [0002] The Internet has evolved into a very diverse set of connections of many different networks and consists of links of various bandwidths. As a result, the Internet's end-to-end network parameters have become more difficult to determine. Additionally, most data applications cannot predict their own business parameters. Therefore, Internet systems generally require a service that dynamically estimates and adapts to the bottleneck bandwidth of an end-to-end Internet path. Bottleneck bandwidth represents the speed of the slowest link of the end-to-end path. [0003] Figure 1 depicts a conventional estimation mechanism commonly known as Receiver Based Packet Pair (RBPP). For simplicity and clarity, the vertical dimension...

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Problems solved by technology

Thus, both methods would produce inaccurate estimates of bottleneck bandwidth if implemented in real time in the existing Internet

Also, since the second method is proposed for offline operation and requires a complete set of bandwidth samples to be prepared at the time of estimation, real-time application of this method is not feasible

Furthermore, these two approaches do not account for the latency variations introduced by the guest's OS kernel during the scheduling and swapping operations

Therefore, the detected intra-packet interval ΔT may be greatly shifted by the OS operation before the packet is sent to the destination node, thus causing the bottleneck bandwidth B B inaccurate estimate of

Furthermore, these two methods require sending time stamps to be placed in each packet, thereby increasing the overhead

In addition, RBPP sends dedicated probe packets to measure bandwidth and generate excessive bandwidth overhead

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