Announcement

There has been a significant interest recently in active and passive measurement techniques for the "bandwidth" characteristics of network paths and links. A number of measurement tools and estimation methodologies have become available, and several research papers have been published on this topic. Additionally, it is expected that such bandwidth estimation techniques can be useful in diverse applications, such as congestion control, streaming applications, overlay network routing, and others.

The Bandwidth Estimation (BEst) workshop aims to bring together the most active researchers in this research area. The main objectives of the workshop will be to discuss recent advancements in this field, resolve arguments (e.g., regarding the terminology and definition of bandwidth metrics, acceptable degree of intrusiveness in active measurements, evaluation of existing measurement tools), and identify open problems that require further research.

Topics of interest (include, but are not limited to):

• New estimation techniques for capacity, available bandwidth, BTC
• Evaluation and comparison of bandwidth estimation tools
• Intrusiveness vs accuracy trade-off
• Bandwidth estimation in TCP and congestion control
• Applications of bandwidth estimation
• Measurement challenges in high-speed paths
• Fallacies and pitfalls in bandwidth estimation

Submission instructions

We invite interested researchers to submit a 1-2 page abstract or position statement. Abstracts will be chosen based on their relevance to the area of bandwidth estimation, and on the diversity of the covered topics. There will be no full-paper submissions or proceedings. Authors of accepted abstracts however should plan to give a 25-minute presentation that will be posted at the workshop's web page (TBA). A significant part of the workshop will be given to round-table discussions and interaction among participants.

Submissions must be in electronic form, as plain-text or PDF (if graphs are included) documents, and they should be submitted by e-mail to: dovrolis@cc.gatech.edu.

Authors of submitted abstracts should commit that they will attend the workshop if their abstract is accepted. There is no registration fee, but we kindly ask attendees to register for the workshop.

Important Dates:

• October 15, 2003 - submission of 1-2 pages abstract
• October 29, 2003 - acceptance notification
• December 9-10, 2003 - BEst workshop held at CAIDA in San Diego, CA

Organizing and program committee:

• Mark Allman (ICIR-ICSI, mallman@acm.org)
• K Claffy (CAIDA, kc@caida.org)
• Constantinos Dovrolis (Georgia Tech, dovrolis@cc.gatech.edu)
• Matt Mathis (PSC, mathis@psc.edu)
• Brian Tierney (LBNL, bltierney@lbl.gov)
• Darryl Veitch (Univ-Melbourne & SprintLabs ATL, dveitch@sprintlabs.com)

Sponsors

The workshop is sponsored by the DOE grant "Bandwidth Estimation: Measurements, Methodologies and Applications" DE-FC02-01ER25466.