Available bandwidth, along with latency and packet loss rate, is an essential metric for the efficient operation of overlay network applications. However, the measurement of available bandwidth creates a larger traffic overhead than other metrics. Measurement conflicts on route-overlapping paths can also seriously degrade measurement accuracy and cause a non-negligible increase in the network load. In this paper, we propose a distributed method for measuring the available bandwidth in overlay networks that can reduce measurement conflicts while maintaining high measurement accuracy at low cost. Our main idea is that neighboring overlay nodes exchange route information to detect overlapping paths and share the measurement results of overlapping paths to configure parameter settings for available bandwidth measurements. Our simulation results show that the relative errors in the measurement results of our method are approximately only 65% of those of the existing method. The measurement accuracy of our method remains better than that of the existing method when the total measurement traffic loads of both methods are equal.

Measuring network resource information, including available bandwidth, propagation delay, and packet loss ratio, is an important task for efficient operation of overlay network services. Although measurement accuracy can be enhanced by frequent measurements, performing measurements with high frequency can cause measurement conflict problem that increases the network load and degrades measurement accuracy. In this paper, we propose a low-cost, distributed and conflict-aware measurement method that reduces measurement conflicts while maintaining high measurement accuracy. The main idea is that the overlay node exchanges the route information and the measurement results with its neighboring overlay nodes while decreasing the measurement frequency. This means our method trades the overhead of conducting measurements for the overhead of information exchange to enhance measurement accuracy. Simulation results show that the relative error in the measurement results of our method can be decreased by half compared with the existing method when the total measurement overheads of both methods are equal. We also confirm that exchanging measurement results contributes more to the enhancement of measurement accuracy than performing measurements.