Abstract
Bandwidth is one of the most common terms in digital communication as it represents the supported amount of data that a link or network path can send per unit of time. Multimedia application's performance is directly impacted by available bandwidth because these applications have diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Internet is now a necessary technology in our daily life, and because of mobile communication systems people can access the network anytime and anywhere, resulting in an increase in the number of users. Such evolution brings new services that will require more data rates. As a result of this load, some services and users in the network will demand for certain data rate which cannot be guaranteed. In the past, there have been several proposals that provide some mechanism for bandwidth estimation based on the size of web message and TCP/IP stack. However, these solutions tend to provide unreliable bandwidth estimation due to TCP/IP buffering. This paper proposes a bandwidth estimation mechanism (BEM) that is capable of providing reliable estimation of the available bandwidth to users or applications. The experimental results validate the intrusiveness and the ability of the proposed BEM to provide accurate bandwidth estimates.