Pathtrait: A Tool for Tight Link Location and End-to-End Available Bandwidth Measurement

Estimating the end-to-end available bandwidth along a network path is of great significance in congestion control, streaming applications, QoS verification, server selection. Knowing the exact locations of tight links, network operators can apply traffic engineering, routing policy optimization and fault diagnosis. In this paper we present Pathtrait, a tool that allows end users to accurately locate the tight link along a network path and efficiently estimate the end-to-end available bandwidth through the information of tight link location. Pathtrait is based on a novel probing technique that generates three different sorts of probing trains. We utilize a original probing structure to capture the input rate and output rate of a single probing train at certain link among the estimated network path, which can infer the tight link and estimate the available bandwidth of the tight link.