ABwE: A Practical Approach to Available Bandwidth Estimation

This paper reports on a new tool developed for monitoring available bandwidth in the range from several Mbps to 1000 Mbps. The tool is based on the packet pair dispersion technique. It has been in experimental use at SLAC for several months and it has been demonstrated at iGrid2002 and SC2002. It can be used for detecting bandwidth changes caused by routing or congestions. This paper has studied the influence of cross traffic and the behavior of routers on the delay of the probing packets. The paper presents part of these analyses together with results from monitoring of 12 paths in US, Japan and in Europe.