Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 2, number 4, 2009 // View article

ASSOLO: an Efficient Tool for Active End-to-end Available Bandwidth Estimation

Authors:
Emanuele Goldoni
Giuseppe Rossi
Alberto Torelli

Keywords: Available bandwidth, active network measurement, performance evaluation, real-time

Abstract:
End-to-end available bandwidth estimation is a crucial metric for bandwidth-dependent services such as multimedia streaming, peer-to-peer and gaming applications; it is also useful for quality of service verification and traffic engineering. This paper presents the details of ASSOLO, an efficient active probing tool for estimating the available bandwidth of a network path. The tool is based on the well-known concept of “self-induced congestion”, and it features a new probing traffic profile called REACH (Reflected ExponentiAl Chirp) to test a wide range of possible rates with a single stream of packets. In addition, the program runs inside a real-time operating system and uses some de-noising techniques to improve the measurement process. Experimental results show that ASSOLO outperforms pathChirp, a state-of-the-art measurement tool, estimating the available bandwidth with greater accuracy and stability in presence of different cross-traffic sources. Moreover, we demonstrate that the use of a real-time operating system can increase the stability of the estimations lowering the impact of software context switches.

Pages: 283 to 292

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: March 17, 2010

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x