Estimation of the available bandwidth ratio of a remote link or path segments

Available bandwidth is usually sensitive to network anomalies such as physical link failure, congestion, and DDoS attack. Thus, real-time available bandwidth information can be used to detect network anomalies. Many schemes have been proposed to estimate the end-to-end available bandwidth or end-to-end capacity. However, the problem of estimating the available bandwidth for a specific remote link has not been investigated in detail yet. We propose a new scheme to estimate the available bandwidth ratio of a remote link or remote path segments, a group of consecutive links, without deploying our tool at the remote nodes. The scheme would be helpful in accurately pinpointing anomalous links. Two streams of ICMP timestamp packets are sent to both end nodes of a target link according to a Poisson process, and the available bandwidth ratio for the target link is estimated based on the measured packet delay. Since the proposed scheme needs not incur a short-term congestion, unlike conventional end-to-end available bandwidth estimation mechanisms, the intrusiveness is low and the proposed scheme overcomes the limitation of conventional approaches, inability to probe the links beyond the tight link with the minimum available bandwidth. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by ns-2 simulation.