Using the last-mile model as a distributed scheme for available bandwidth prediction

Abstract

Several Network Coordinate Systems have been proposed to predict unknown network distances between a large number of Internet nodes by using only a small number of measurements. These systems focus on predicting latency, and they are not adapted to the prediction of available bandwidth. But end-to-end path available bandwidth is an important metric for the performance optimisation in many high throughput distributed applications, such as video streaming and file sharing networks. In this paper, we propose to perform available bandwidth prediction with the last-mile model, in which each node is characterised by its incoming and outgoing capacities. This model has been used in several theoretical works for distributed applications. We design decentralised heuristics to compute the capacities of each node so as to minimise the prediction error. We show that our algorithms can achieve a competitive accuracy even with asymmetric and erroneous end-to-end measurement datasets. A comparison with existing models (Vivaldi, Sequoia, PathGuru, DMF) is provided. Simulation results also show that our heuristics can provide good quality predictions even when using a very small number of measurements.