MR-BART: Multi-Rate Available Bandwidth Estimation in Real-Time

TL;DR

This paper introduces MR-BART, a real-time multi-rate bandwidth estimation method that improves robustness, convergence speed, and accuracy over previous techniques using Kalman filtering.

Contribution

MR-BART extends BART with multi-rate probing and analytical error analysis, enhancing real-time bandwidth estimation performance.

Findings

MR-BART converges faster than BART.

MR-BART provides more accurate bandwidth estimates.

Analytical formulas for estimation error are derived.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Multi-Rate Bandwidth Available in Real Time (MR-BART) to estimate the end-to-end Available Bandwidth (AB) of a network path. The proposed scheme is an extension of the Bandwidth Available in Real Time (BART) which employs multi-rate (MR) probe packet sequences with Kalman filtering. Comparing to BART, we show that the proposed method is more robust and converges faster than that of BART and achieves a more AB accurate estimation. Furthermore, we analyze the estimation error in MR-BART and obtain analytical formula and empirical expression for the AB estimation error based on the system parameters.