Where is the Tight Link in a Home Wireless Broadband Environment?

Nowadays, tariffs and packages on offer for broadband worldwide gives a general story of increased speed and reduced prices. As a complementary to fixed-line broadband access, WiFi networks are undoubtedly taking off in many American households. Due to the combination of wireless technology and fixed-line broadband access, prior available bandwidth measurement tools may not be an appropriate solution for a common broadband subscriber. In this paper, we utilize abget in combination with Multi-Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) to target the tight link of the Internet. Based on the observation that the tight link of the Internet in the context of an in-home wireless broadband access is usually on the edge of the Internet, we then introduce ABODE, a single-end, light-weight tool for estimating available bandwidth in the context of an in-home wireless bandwidth environment. ABODE harnesses ICMP echo request messages to generate stable, rate-controlled traffic flows. Based on the timestamp of ICMP echo reply messages, ABODE performs available bandwidth estimation by calculating the drift of the time centroid over a traffic How. To verify the accuracy of ABODE, we use MRTG data to compare with the estimation results of ABODE. The measurement shows that ABODE is capable of efficiently estimating available bandwidth in the context of an in-home wireless broadband environment.