Active end-to-end available bandwidth estimation is intrusive, expensive, inaccurate, and does not work well with bursty cross traffic or on high capacity links. Yet, it is important for designing high performant networked systems, improving network protocols, building distributed systems, and improving application performance. In this paper, we present minProbe which addresses unsolved issues that have plagued available bandwidth estimation. As a middlebox, minProbe measures and estimates available bandwidth with high-fidelity, minimal-cost, and in userspace; thus, enabling cheaper (virtually no overhead) and more accurate available bandwidth estimation. MinProbe performs accurately on high capacity networks up to 10 Gbps and with bursty cross traffic. We evaluated the performance and accuracy of minProbe over a wide-area network, the National Lambda Rail (NLR), and within our own network testbed. Results indicate that minProbe can estimate available bandwidth with error typically no more than 0.4 Gbps in a 10 Gbps network.
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