TCP Available Bandwidth Estimation Function with Socket API

Abstract

Recently, a lot of streaming services making use of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) are developed. To keep the QoS in the streaming services highly, it is important to estimate available bandwidth of TCP stream precisely in a short period of time. We propose the real time available bandwidth estimating method. Our proposed method has the two advantages for the conventional bandwidth estimating methods. (1) Our proposed method does not generate the test traffic for the estimation and (2) considers the network conditions such as the jitter and latency. Therefore, our proposed method realizes the real time bandwidth estimation with lower network load and higher precision. Application software can easily use the results obtained by the function through socket API (Application Programming Interface). We implement the method for the TCP protocol stacks and compare the precision with the conventional bandwidth estimation tools. From the experimental results, our method outperforms the tools in the presicion.