Towards unified self-congestion probing for bandwidth measurement

Abstract

The self-congestion probing, which estimates bandwidth by controlling a temporal congestion of a probing stream, is the most popular approach in bandwidth measurement. Self-congestion tools are easy to implement, fast to converge and are robust to network dynamics with reasonably good accuracy; however, the current tools only exploit parts of the congestion signals, though the probing stream experiences a rich spectrum of congestion signals. TCP protocols follow the same self-congestion principle on inferring available bandwidth. We propose a unified self-congestion probing framework by bridging the self-congestion probing for available bandwidth measurement and TCP congestion control. The recent progress of TCP congestion control in both theory and experimentation provides new avenues in improving the current self-congestion tools. Based on this unified framework, we design and evaluate a simple available bandwidth probing scheme to utilize the explicit congestion notification signal, namely, ECNProbe. We conduct a measurement study on a Linux-based testbed and evaluate the performance of several available bandwidth measurement tools. We demonstrate that the proposed ECNProbe significantly improves the measurement accuracy with small convergence time and low overhead probing.