Can Bandwidth Estimation Tackle Noise at Ultra-high Speeds?

Abstract

Abstract-While existing bandwidth estimation tools have been shown to perform well on 100Mbps networks, they fail to do so at gigabit and higher network speeds. This is because finer inter-packet gaps are needed to probe for higher ratesfine gaps are more susceptible to be disturbed by small-scale buffering-related noise. In this paper, we evaluate existing noisereduction techniques for tackling the issue, and show that they are ineffective on 10Gbps links. We propose a novel smoothing strategy, Buffering-aware Spike Smoothing (BASS), which can be applied effectively to both single-rate and multi-rate probing frameworks and help significantly in scaling bandwidth estimation to ultra-high speed networks. Besides, we provide first evidence that accurate bandwidth estimation using our strategy can help improve the performance of congestion-control protocols on real 10Gbps networks.