Evaluation of the ProgHW/SW Architectural Design Space of Bandwidth Estimation.

Bandwidth estimation (BWE) is a fundamental functionality in congestion control, load balancing, and many network applications. Therefore, researchers have conducted numerous BWE evaluations to improve its estimation accuracy. Most current evaluations focus on the algorithmic aspects or network conditions of BWE. However, as the architectural aspects of BWE gradually become the bottleneck in multi-gigabit networks, many solutions derived from current works fail to provide satisfactory performance. In contrast, this paper focuses on the architectural aspects of BWE in the current trend of programmable hardware (ProgHW) and software (SW) co-designs. Our work makes several new findings to improve BWE accuracy from the architectural perspective. For instance, we show that offloading components that can directly affect inter-packet delay (IPD) is an effective way to improve BWE accuracy. In addition, to handle the architectural deployment difficulty not appeared in past studies, we propose a modularization method to increase evaluation efficiency.