A Min-Plus System Interpretation of Available Bandwidth Estimation

Markus Fidler
Multimedia Communications Lab
Technische Universität Darmstadt


Abstract

Available bandwidth denotes the share of the capacity of a network
path that is unused by cross-traffic. The idea to estimate the
available bandwidth from measurements dates back to packet pair
probing and TCP congestion control. It plays an important role for
the future Internet, with further applications e.g. in dimensioning,
traffic engineering, admission control, and quality of service.

In spite of a variety of probing schemes, the fundamentals of
bandwidth estimation are still not well understood. In our work, we
explore the task of bandwidth estimation in min-plus systems theory.
Interestingly, the solutions to the resulting inversion problem
substantiate various known methods for bandwidth estimation. This
fundamental connection between network calculus and bandwidth
estimation provides essential insights and lays the foundation for
numerous new applications.

This talk presents joint work with Jörg Liebeherr and Shahrokh Valaee
(University of Toronto).