On the applicability of available bandwidth estimation techniques and tools

Available Bandwidth Estimation Techniques and Tools (ABETTs) have recently been envisioned as a supporting mechanism in areas such as compliance of service level agreements, network management, traffic engineering and real-time resource provisioning, flow and congestion control, construction of overlay networks, fast detection of failures and network attacks, and admission control. However, it is unknown whether current ABETTs can run efficiently in any type of network, under different network conditions, and whether they can provide available bandwidth estimates at the timescales needed by these applications. This article includes a performance evaluation of Pathload, Pathchirp, Spruce, IGI, and Abing in a low cost and flexible test bed. The evaluation includes scenarios and conditions not evaluated before, such as varying the packet loss rate and the propagation delays of the links, the amount of cross-traffic, the capacity of the links, and the cross-traffic packet size. The results demonstrate that ABETTs are far from being ready to be applied in all these applications and scenarios. In addition, the article clearly indicates those aspects that need further research and which ABETTs are the best candidates for specific applications and environments.