Abstract-A fundamental problem of current bandwidth estimation methods is that they require accurate packet time information. However, it is hard to accurately measure packet time information in an increasing number of network environments, such as widely deployed highspeed networks, and emerging cloud computing networks. Motivated by the observation that many applications only need the relative bandwidth information of different paths instead of the actual bandwidth information of a single path, we propose sequence-based bandwidth comparison. Specifically, this paper proposes a capacity comparison method, called PathComp, which can relatively compare the capacities of the paths from two senders to the same receiver. PathComp mainly uses the arrival sequence information of packets, and does not require any accurate packet time information. Our testbed, campus network, and EC2 experiments show that PathComp can not only determine which path is faster but also accurately determine how much faster in a variety of network environments.
Abstract-The router buffer sizing problem is a vital problem to the performance of the Internet. The traditional rule-of-thumb is that the router buffer size should be equal to the bandwidthdelay product (BDP) of a link. Recent studies show that the router buffer size can be significantly smaller than the BDP without causing negative impact on the TCP performance in the Internet. But a fundamental assumption of all those studies is that all the TCP traffic in the Internet is generated by the traditional RENO protocol, which, however, is no longer true as the current Internet is dominated by multiple different TCP protocols, such as RENO, CUBIC and Compound TCP (CTCP). Thus, it is imperative that we revisit the router buffer sizing problem for the Internet with heterogeneous TCP. In this paper, we propose methods to determine the router buffer size requirements under various constraints for the Internet with heterogeneous TCP and discuss the tradeoff among the constraints. The constraints considered include the link utilization constraint, the packet drop rate constraint, and the queuing delay constraint. Our study shows that the required router buffer size can be significantly smaller than the BDP but also demonstrates that it is dependent on the protocol mix of the heterogeneous TCP flows.
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