The common utilization-based definition of available bandwidth and many of
the existing tools to estimate it suffer from several important weaknesses: i)
most tools report a point estimate of average available bandwidth over a
measurement interval and do not provide a confidence interval; ii) the commonly
adopted models used to relate the available bandwidth metric to the measured
data are invalid in almost all practical scenarios; iii) existing tools do not
scale well and are not suited to the task of multi-path estimation in
large-scale networks; iv) almost all tools use ad-hoc techniques to address
measurement noise; and v) tools do not provide enough flexibility in terms of
accuracy, overhead, latency and reliability to adapt to the requirements of
various applications. In this paper we propose a new definition for available
bandwidth and a novel framework that addresses these issues. We define
probabilistic available bandwidth (PAB) as the largest input rate at which we
can send a traffic flow along a path while achieving, with specified
probability, an output rate that is almost as large as the input rate. PAB is
expressed directly in terms of the measurable output rate and includes
adjustable parameters that allow the user to adapt to different application
requirements. Our probabilistic framework to estimate network-wide
probabilistic available bandwidth is based on packet trains, Bayesian
inference, factor graphs and active sampling. We deploy our tool on the
PlanetLab network and our results show that we can obtain accurate estimates
with a much smaller measurement overhead compared to existing approaches.Comment: Submitted to Computer Network