Abstract: Packet dispersion technique is one of the useful path capacity estimation methodology and usually employs continuous sending policy to send probing packets. 13ut the accuracy of measurement is affected by the lower utilization of transmission rate at the sender. Based on fragmentation mechanism, a novel scheme of path capacity estimation for IPv6 networks was proposed. An original probing packet with its size larger than Path Maximum Transfer Unit is generated at the sender, and then be split into a serial of equal-sized fragments by the protocol stack. It is shown by extensive experimental results that the proposed scheme can lead to lower dispersion of the probing packets at the sender and a greater capability against the cross traffic, compared with the classical tool called pathrate.

Key words: Path capacity, Fragmentation, Packet dispersion, Cross traffic, Network measurements