Distributed active measuring link bandwidth in IP networks

Link bandwidth is obviously critical for numerous network management tasks. Taking into account the issues of measuring costs and network-wide view for large IP network, a distributed measuring system would be an ideal monitoring architecture for active measuring link bandwidth. In this paper, we address the problem of efficiently measure assignment, which optimizing goal is to reduce the cost of measuring all links bandwidth. We show that this problem is NP-hard and propose an approximation algorithm with approximation ratio 2. The effectiveness of our measuring algorithm is validated by simulations evaluation over a wide range of network topologies.