Some applications of bandwidth estimation


                       Andrew Odlyzko

                 Digital Technology Center
                  University of Minnesota
                  Minneapolis, Minnesota

                     odlyzko@umn.edu
              http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko



A very important application of bandwidth estimation is in
understanding the evolution and economics of the Internet.
Service providers have been almost uniformly unwilling to
release any solid statistics about the capacity or traffic
on their networks.  This secretiveness, combined with some
deliberate misinformation, was among the leading causes of
the telecom crash, as the industry assumed unrealistically
high growth rates were the norm.  Unfortunately, the crash
has not changed attitudes among the carriers to a significant 
degree.  It would therefore be advantageous to obtain a
set of independent measurements of carrier networks.  It
would serve as a check on claims made by service providers,
and hopefully would serve to persuade them to be more open,
as they learn that many of their supposed secrets can be
obtained by outsiders.

Good estimates of traffic and capacity would serve to provide
guidelines for the supplier sector.  They would also help in
projecting what the role of various technologies (QoS, optical
Internet, etc.) might be,

I have been using for quite a while a variety of snippets
of information about capacity and traffic on many networks 
to estimate what is happening.  Papers summarizing various
of these studies are available at

   <http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html>

In pursuit of more systematic data, I am currently developing
(with the assistance of a graduate student) tools for monitoring
traffic on a variety of sites.  I would like to combine those
with bandwidth estimation techniques.