Telescope: measuring capacity between remote hosts

Abstract

The term bandwidth, capacity, and throughput characterize the amount of data that can be transferred per unit time. Accurate estimation of bandwidth can be leveraged by various applications which seek to provide best user experience such as peer to peer file transfer. Bandwidth estimation is an age-old problem and many people have sought to estimate it correctly. Many tools exist which employ various strategies in an attempt to measure the capacity of the path such as pathrate, sprobe, nettimer, etc. However, to the best of our knowledge, all of the existing tools require access to atleast one of the endhosts to estimate the capacity. No tool exists which can measure capacity between two remote hosts.In this project we have proposed a tool which can with sufficient con_dence estimate the one way capacity between two systems (endhosts or routers) of which we do not possess any access,using a single probing machine, under certain basic assumptions.