A Framework for Defining Empirical Bulk Transfer Capacity Metrics

Bulk Transport Capacity (BTC) is a measure of a network’s ability to transfer significant quantities of data with a single congestionaware transport connection (e.g., TCP). The intuitive definition of BTC is the expected long term average data rate (bits per second) of a single ideal TCP implementation over the path in question. However, there are many congestion control algorithms (and hence transport implementations) permitted by IETF standards. This diversity in transport algorithms creates a difficulty for standardizing BTC metrics because the allowed diversity is sufficient to lead to situations where different implementations will yield non-comparable measures -and potentially fail the formal tests for being a metric.