Measuring The Edge-To-Edge Available Bandwidth In A Diffserv Domain

The new Internet will be deployed with a number of tools for network management and quality of service control. To this end, we focus on a single administrative domain based on the Differentiated Services architectural model, and we recognize the need for two main functions for each supported traffic class: an admission control procedure, and a monitoring of the edge-to-edge bandwidth availability. In this work, we specifically focus on the second issue. To preserve scalability and thus to be compliant with Differentiated Services architecture, we propose stateless and distributed procedures based on traffic measurements. Our technique tests network resources by means of 'special' probing packets, which have the task of implicitly conveying the network status to its edges. We show by means of simulations the effectiveness of our solutions, in spite of a very low overhead. Copyright (C) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.