Abstract

Session

Tracing and Measurement

Paper

8-3

Full Paper

ps.gz

Title

Measuring Link Bandwidths Using a Deterministic Model of Packet Delay

Author(s)

Kevin Lai (Stanford University)
Mary Baker (Stanford University)

Abstract:

Based on a new deterministic model of packet delay, we develop a novel technique, called packet tailgating, for measuring link bandwidths along a path through an internet. Packet tailgating is faster and consumes less network bandwidth than previous techniques. Unlike its predecessors, packet tailgating can detect multi-channel links, can be run on multicast trees, does not rely on consistent behavior of routers handling ICMP packets, and does not rely on timely delivery of acknowledgments. Using our implementation of packet tailgating, we demonstrate its utility on real traffic in the Internet. Our measurements indicate that for the same amount of traffic, packet tailgating is at least as accurate as other current measurement tools.
We also use our deterministic model of packet delay to prove the correctness of the packet pair [Bol93] technique for measuring the bandwidth of the lowest-bandwidth link along a path (the bottleneck bandwidth). Packet pair has previously been explained intuitively but not analytically.