Probing available bandwidth in radio access networks
Sven Krasser, H.L. Owen, Jochen Grimminger, H.-P. Huth, Joachim Sokol · 2004
This paper presents a way of measuring whether a certain amount of bandwidth is available on a path in a radio access network or in other kinds of networks with DiffServ support. The basic concept is to fill up the bandwidth that is not used by normal data traffic with special probe packets, which are only forwarded if there are no data packets that could be forwarded. When probing multiple paths the interaction of different probe flows can be exploited to signal bandwidth requirements and to reserve bandwidth. In contrast to other approaches, the available bandwidth is not estimated by using statistical properties of the transmission of trains of packets but determined by measuring the actual throughput of a stream of low-priority probe packets.