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Single Link Capacity Measurement Technique for End-to-End Path
Qihua Yang, Tarek Saadawi and Ahmed Abdelal

Measuring network capacity is important for traffic engineering, QoS and admission control. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to measure any single link capacity in an end-to-end path. Unlike most of the existing methods that can only measure path bottleneck link capacity, the proposed end-to-end probing method can measure single link capacity along the path or segment path by using a pair of packet probing trains. Such an approach can be useful in network resource management, network topology inference, and admission control.

Our approach is edge-based scheme. Measurements are made at the network edge. The scheme does not impose any requirements on the network router other than the ability to prioritize packets. It can be easily implemented in various networks. We have evaluated our scheme’s accuracy and efficiency through a set of network simulation experiments.

Keywords: Single link capacity, tailgating, active probing, passive probing, packet probing train, end-to-end path.

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