US Patent 9397920 Multi-path network bandwidth estimation

Some embodiments provide a method for measuring network characteristics (e.g., bandwidth estimation, path diversity, etc.) without requiring administrative access to intermediate network elements and independent from the specific network fabric. The method measures the bandwidth (e.g., available bandwidth, capacity, etc.) between a given pair of endpoints (e.g., a source forwarding element and a destination forwarding element at the edges of the network) by identifying the routing paths between the endpoints and calculating the bandwidth for each path in order to estimate the network bandwidth between the endpoints.