Measuring Available Bandwidth for Smart Cyber-Physical Applications

The powerful processors and the variety of sensors in new and upcoming mobile Internet devices, such as iPhones and Android-based smart phones, can be leveraged to build cyber-physical applications that collect sensor data from the real world and communicate it back to the Internet for comprehensive processing. Available bandwidth measurement has been discussed previously in the computer networking community. Currently, it is important for cyber-physical applications to behave smartly since these applications prefer small data packets, short round-trip times, and sudden bursts of traffic. A new available bandwidth measurement technique for cyber-physical applications, SOProbe, was introduced and its accuracy was verified through ns-2 simulation. The experimental data indicate that this methodology can enable the gateway node to measure the available bandwidth of a path at low cost.