Conclusion

In this paper, we describe the trade-offs involved in implementing nettimer, a Packet Pair-based tool for passively measuring bottleneck link bandwidths in real time in the Internet. We show its utility across a wide variety of bottleneck link technologies ranging from 19.2Kb/s to 100Mb/s, wired and wireless, symmetric and asymmetric bandwidth, across local area and cross country paths, while using both one and two packet capture hosts.

In the future, we hope that nettimer will ease the creation of adaptive applications, provide more insight for network performance analysis, and lead to the development of more precise performance measurement algorithms.