RT-WABest: A novel end-to-end bandwidth estimation tool in IEEE 802.11 wireless network

Abstract

In 802.11 wireless network, a large number of multimedia applications are emerging. Accurate end-to-end bandwidth estimation techniques can help these applications adjust their behavior accordingly, such as stream’s bitrate adaptation, to improve quality of service. However, most current bandwidth estimation techniques are designed for wired networks that have high intrusiveness and consume long convergence time, which cannot be applied in resource-limited wireless network. In this article, we present a novel bandwidth estimation tool for IEEE 802.11 wireless network, which only needs to be deployed in one end of the end-to-end path and estimate available bandwidth based on round-trip-time measurements with low intrusiveness and short convergence time. We compare our tool with another state-of-the-art tool on an IEEE 802.11 wireless testbed, and the experimental results show that our tool has higher accuracy.