Estimating available capacity of a network connection

Abstract

Capacity measures for a network connection across the Internet are useful to many applications. Its applicability encompasses QoS guarantees, congestion control and other related areas. In this paper we define and measure the available capacity of a connection, through observations at endpoints only. Our measurements account for the variability of cross traffic that passes through the routers handling this connection. Related to the estimation of available capacity, we suggest modifications to current techniques to measure the packet service time of the "bottleneck" router of the connection. Finally, we present estimation results on wide-area network connections from our experiments to multiple sites.