Dina Katabi - 10/31/03
CSAIL, MIT
slides (ppt, pdf), videorecording (wmv, rm use Internet Explorer to view these movies)

A LARGE-SCALE MEASUREMENT STUDY OF AVAILABLE BANDWIDTH ESTIMATION TOOLS

Available bandwidth estimation is useful for route selection in overlay networks, QoS verification, and traffic 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.

This talk introduces Spruce, a simple, light-weight tool for measuring available bandwidth, and compares it with two existing tools, IGI and Pathload, over 400 different Internet paths. The comparison focuses on accuracy, failure patterns, and probe overhead. We verify the measured available bandwidth by comparing it to Multi-Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) data and by measuring how each tool responds to induced changes in available bandwidth.

Bio

Dina Katabi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She received her PhD and MS from MIT in 2003 and 1999, and her Bachelor of Science from Damascus University in 1995. Her research interests are in computer networks and data communication. They encompass congestion control, network measurements, scalability and robustness of communication systems, routing, content distribution, peer-to-peer systems, self-configurable and wireless networks, and network security.