Several applications, services, and protocols are conjectured to benefit from the knowledge of the end-to-end available bandwidth on a given Internet path. Unfortunately, despite the availability of several bandwidth estimation techniques, there has been only a limited adoption of these in contemporary applications. We identify two issues that contribute to this state of affairs. First, there is a lack of comprehensive evaluations that can help application developers in calibrating the relative performance of these tools--this is especially limiting since the performance of these tools depends on algorithmic, implementation, as well as temporal aspects of probing for available bandwidth. Second, most existing bandwidth estimation tools impose a large probing overhead on the paths over which bandwidth is measured. This can be a significant deterrent for deploying these tools in distributed infrastructures that need to measure bandwidth on several paths periodically. In this dissertation, we address the two issues raised above by making the following contributions: We conduct the first comprehensive black-box evaluation of a large suite of prominent available bandwidth estimation tools on a high-speed network. In this evaluation,we also illustrate the impact that technological and implementation limitations can have on the performance of bandwidth-estimation tools. We conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of available bandwidth estimation algorithms, independent of systemic and implementation biases. In this evaluation, we also illustrate the impact temporal factor such as measurement timescales have on the observed relative performance of bandwidth-estimation tools. We demonstrate that temporal properties can significantly impact the AB estimation process. We redesign the interfaces of existing bandwidth-estimation tools to allow temporal parameters to be explicitly specified and controlled. We design AB inference schemes which can be used to scalably and collaboratively infer the available bandwidth for a large set of end-to-end paths. These schemes allow an operator to select the desired operating point in the trade-off between accuracy and overhead of AB estimation. We further demonstrate that in order to monitor the bandwidth on all paths of a network we do not need access to per-hop bandwidth estimates and can simply rely on end-to-end bandwidth estimates
