Ternary-search-based scheme to measure link available-bandwidth in wired networks

Accurate measurement of available bandwidth (ABW) is an important parameter to analyze network performance. Active measurement is an attractive approach as it provides controllability and flexibility to perform network measurement and monitoring. However, active measurement can affect both the data traffic and the measurement process itself if a significant amount of probe traffic is injected into the network. Furthermore, measurement must be completed in short time to effectively monitor the network state. In this paper, we propose a fast ABW measurement scheme that generates a small amount of probe traffic to achieve an acceptable measurement accuracy. The proposed scheme achieves an accuracy comparable to that of popular existing schemes. We present a performance study of the proposed scheme through ns2 simulation under different traffic conditions.