This paper presents pathChirp, a new active probing tool for estimating the available bandwidth on a communication network path. Based on the concept of "self-induced congestion," pathChirp features an exponential flight pattern of probes we call a chirp. Packet chips offer several significant advantages over current probing schemes based on packet pairs or packet trains. By rapidly increasing the probing rate within each chirp, pathChirp obtains a rich set of information from which to dynamically estimate the available bandwidth. Since it uses only packet interarrival times for estimation, pathChirp does not require synchronous nor highly stable clocks at the sender and receiver. We test pathChirp with simulations and Internet experiments and find that it provides good estimates of the available bandwidth while using only a fraction of the number of probe bytes that current stateof -the-art techniques use.

Available bandwidth estimation is useful for route selection in overlay networks, QoS verification, and tra#c engineering. Recent years have seen a surge in interest in available bandwidth estimation. A few tools have been proposed and evaluated in simulation and over a limited number of Internet paths, but there is still great uncertainty in the performance of these tools over the Internet at large.

Abstract — In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of the iPlane, a scalable service providing accurate predictions of Internet path performance for emerging overlay services. Unlike the more common black box latency prediction techniques in use today, the iPlane builds an explanatory model of the Internet. We predict end-to-end performance by composing measured performance of segments of known Internet paths. This method allows us to accurately and efficiently predict latency, bandwidth, capacity and loss rates between arbitrary Internet hosts. We demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the iPlane service by applying it to several representative overlay services in use today: content distribution, swarming peer-to-peer filesharing, and voice-over-IP. In each case, we observe that using iPlane’s predictions leads to a significant improvement in end user performance. 1

The packet pair mechanism has been shown to be a reliable method to measure the bottleneck link capacity on a network path, but its use for measuring available bandwidth is more challenging. In this paper, we use modeling, measurements, and simulations to better characterize the interaction between probing packets and the competing network traffic. We first construct a simple model to understand how competing traffic changes the probing packet gap for a single-hop network. The gap model shows that the initial probing gap is a critical parameter when using packet pairs to estimate available bandwidth. Based on this insight, we present two available bandwidth measurement techniques, the initial gap increasing (IGI) method and the packet transmission rate (PTR) method. We use extensive Internet measurements to show that these techniques estimate available bandwidth faster than existing techniques such as Pathload, with comparable accuracy. Finally, using both Internet measurements and ns simulations, we explore how the measurement accuracy of active probing is affected by factors such as the probing packet size, the length of probing packet train, and the competing traffic on links other than the tight link.

Denial of Service attacks are presenting an increasing threat to the global inter-networking infrastructure. While TCP's congestion control algorithm is highly robust to diverse network conditions, its implicit assumption of end-system cooperation results in a wellknown vulnerability to attack by high-rate non-responsive flows. In this paper, we investigate a class of low-rate denial of service attacks which, unlike high-rate attacks, are difficult for routers and counter-DoS mechanisms to detect. Using a combination of analytical modeling, simulations, and Internet experiments, we show that maliciously chosen low-rate DoS traffic patterns that exploit TCP's retransmission time-out mechanism can throttle TCP flows to a small fraction of their ideal rate while eluding detection. Moreover, as such attacks exploit protocol homogeneity, we study fundamental limits of the ability of a class of randomized time-out mechanisms to thwart such low-rate DoS attacks.

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of PROMISE, a novel peer-to-peer media streaming system encompassing the key functions of peer lookup, peer-based aggregated streaming, and dynamic adaptations to network and peer conditions. Particularly, PROMISE is based on a new application level P2P service called CollectCast. CollectCast performs three main functions: (1) inferring and leveraging the underlying network topology and performance information for the selection of senders; (2) monitoring the status of peers and connections and reacting to peer/connection failure or degradation with low overhead; (3) dynamically switching active senders and standby senders, so that the collective network performance out of the active senders remains satisfactory. Based on both real-world measurement and simulation, we evaluate the performance of PROMISE, and discuss lessons learned from our experience with respect to the practicality and further optimization of PROMISE.

We present Scriptroute, a system that allows ordinary Internet users to conduct network measurements from remote vantage points. We seek to combine the flex-ibility found in dedicated measurement testbeds such as NIMI with the general accessibility and popularityof Web-based public traceroute servers. To use Scriptroute, clients use DNS to discover measurement serversand then submit a measurement script for execution in a sandboxed, resource-limited environment. The serversensure that the script does not expose the network to attack by applying source- and destination-specific filtersand security checks, and by rate-limiting traffic. Scriptroute code is publicly available and has been de-ployed on the PlanetLab testbed of 42 sites. As proof-of-concept, we have used it both to create RPT, a toolfor measuring routing trees toward a destination, and to repeat the experiment used to evaluate GNP, a recently proposed Internet distance estimation technique. We find that our system is flexible enough to implement avariety of measurement tools despite its security restrictions, that access to many remote vantage points makesthe system valuable, and that scripting is an apt choice for expressing and combining measurement tasks.

The available bandwidth of a network path P is the maximum throughput that P can provide to a flow, without reducing the throughput of the cross traffic in P. We have developed an end-to-end active measurement tool, called pathload, that estimates the available bandwidth of a network path. The basic idea in pathload is that the one-way delays of a periodic packet stream show increasing trend, when the stream rate is larger than the available bandwidth. In this paper, we describe pathload in detail, and show some experimental results that illustrate the tool's accuracy.

Conventional wisdom has been that the performance limitations in the current Internet lie at the edges of the network – i.e last mile connectivity to users, or access links of stub ASes. As these links are upgraded, however, it is important to consider where new bottlenecks and hot-spots are likely to arise. In this paper, we address this question through an investigation of non-access bottlenecks. These are links within carrier ISPs or between neighboring carriers that could potentially constrain the bandwidth available to longlived TCP flows. Through an extensive measurement study, we discover, classify, and characterize bottleneck links (primarily in the U.S.) in terms of their location, latency, and available capacity. We find that about 50 % of the Internet paths explored have a nonaccess bottleneck with available capacity less than 50 Mbps, many of which limit the performance of well-connected nodes on the Internet today. Surprisingly, the bottlenecks identified are roughly equally split between intra-ISP links and peering links between ISPs. Also, we find that low-latency links, both intra-ISP and peering, have a significant likelihood of constraining available bandwidth. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings on related issues such as choosing an access provider and optimizing routes through the network. We believe that these results could be valuable in guiding the design of future network services, such as overlay routing, in terms of which links or paths to avoid (and how to avoid them) in order to improve performance.

Diagnosing faults in the Internet is arduous and time-consuming, in part because the network is composed of diverse components spread across many administrative domains. We consider an extreme form of this problem: can end users, with no special privileges, identify and pinpoint faults inside the network that degrade the performance of their applications? To answer this question, we present both an architecture for user-level Internet path diagnosis and a practical tool to diagnose paths in the current Internet. Our architecture requires only a small amount of network support, yet it is nearly as complete as analyzing a packet trace collected at all routers along the path. Our tool, tulip, diagnoses reordering, loss and significant queuing events by leveraging well deployed but little exploited router features that approximate our architecture. Tulip can locate points of reordering and loss to within three hops and queuing to within four hops on most paths that we measured. This granularity is comparable to that of a hypothetical network tomography tool that uses 65 diverse hosts to localize faults on a given path. We conclude by proposing several simple changes to the Internet to further improve its diagnostic capabilities.