Packet Train Pair: A fast and efficient technique for measuring available bandwidth in the Internet

The packet train pair (PTP) has been developed as a smart probing technique for monitoring end-to-end available bandwidth on the Internet, and its performance has been examined mainly with a focus on estimation error and the amount of probing bits. The paper sheds light on its distinctive potential ability to simultaneously estimate both end-to-end available bandwidth and link capacity with a single measurement. Although the ability was suggested in a prior work, the performance of PTP for such an application has been left open. The paper shows through simulations that the link capacity estimated with PTP in single-hop networks corresponds exactly to the link capacity. The paper also reveals that the estimated link capacity with PTP in multi-hop networks does not correspond to that of narrow link, but to that of tight link.