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USITS '01 Paper    [USITS '01 Tech Program Index]

Pp. 123–134 of the Proceedings

Nettimer: A Tool for Measuring Bottleneck Link Bandwidth

Kevin Lai Mary Baker
{laik, mgbaker}@cs.stanford.edu
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University

Abstract:

Measuring the bottleneck link bandwidth along a path is important for understanding the performance of many Internet applications. Existing tools to measure bottleneck bandwidth are relatively slow, can only measure bandwidth in one direction, and/or actively send probe packets. We present the nettimer bottleneck link bandwidth measurement tool, the libdpcap distributed packet capture library, and experiments quantifying their utility. We test nettimer across a variety of bottleneck network technologies ranging from 19.2Kb/s to 100Mb/s, wired and wireless, symmetric and asymmetric bandwidth, across local area and cross-country paths, while using both one and two packet capture hosts. In most cases, nettimer has an error of less than 10%, but at worst has an error of 40%, even on cross-country paths of 17 or more hops. It converges within 10KB of the first large packet arrival while consuming less than 7% of the network traffic being measured.





Kevin Lai 2001-01-29

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, March 26-28, 2001, San Francisco, California, USA.
Last changed: 4 Jan. 2002 ml
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