Design, Implementation and Evaluation of ICMP-Based Available Network Bandwidth Measurement Based on IMTCP

摘要

We propose a method to measure available network bandwidth using the Internet Control MessageProtocol (ICMP). The recently proposed ImTCP technique uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) datapackets and the corresponding acknowledgement responses to measure the available bandwidth betweensender and receiver. Since ImTCP needs to change the sender’s TCP implementation, it needsmodifications to sender’s operating system kernel. Moreover, ImTCP cannot measure available bandwidthaccurately if the receiver sends delayed acknowledgments. These problems stem from the use of TCP. Inthis paper, we discuss an ICMP-based method that overcomes these limitations. We evaluate theperformance of the proposed method in an experimental network and show that it generates lessmeasurement traffic and requires less time for bandwidth measurement than PathLoad. We also show thatproposed method can measure the available bandwidth even if the bandwidth changes duringmeasurement.