Faculty Advisor:
Parmesh Ramanathan

Grant:
$16,000 - 9/99 (6 months)

Project:
BWmeter: Tools for Measuring the Capacity and Load of Internet Paths

We develop two network tools, Pathrate and Pathload, for measuring the capacity and available bandwidth, respectively, of Internet paths. Pathrate is based on an adaptive variation of the packet-pair approach, in which the capacity of a path is estimated from the dispersion that a burst of packets encounters in the path. Pathrate is adaptive because the length of the bursts, which is the critical parameter in this method, is determined during run-time at the receiver, based on the statistics of the measurements.

Pathload, on the other hand, measures the delay variations and loss rate of a packet stream that randomly "samples" the path's state. The measured delay variations and loss rate are used in a metric which is positively correlated with the available bandwidth in the path. We will use Pathload to examine experimentally the dynamics of the available bandwidth, which is a question of major importance for real-time applications and traffic engineering.