Estimation of Available Bandwidth of a Remote Link or Path Segments

Available bandwidth is usually sensitive to network anomalies such as physical link failure, congestion, and DDoS attack. Thus, real-time available bandwidth information can be used to detect network anomalies. Many schemes have been proposed to estimate the end-to-end available bandwidth or end-to-end capacity. However, available bandwidth estimation for a specific remote link has not been addressed in detail yet. We propose a new scheme to estimate the available bandwidth of remote path segments without deploying our tool at the remote nodes. We send two streams of ICMP timestamp packets to the both end nodes of the target path segment according to a Poisson process and estimate the available bandwidth for that path segment based on the measured packet delay and PASTA theory. Since 80% of routers respond to ICMP timestamp packets according to our measurement results, our scheme can monitor a much broader range of network path segments than conventional available bandwidth estimation schemes which usually require deployment of probing tools at remote nodes. We evaluate the performance of our scheme by simulation.