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I was wondering: is it possible to calculate bandwidth information from a simple traceroute command? Maybe an approximation using the distance between the nodes could be possible.

The reason I am asking is my slight confusion after reading this Wikipedia article, providing the formula given below

                       Throughoutput <= RWIN / RTT

Where

RWIN is the Receive Window Size

and

RTT is the Round-Trip Time

The result of this equation is the Maximum Bandwidth between the two nodes.

So it looks to me that we getting bandwidth information from latency.

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    No is the short answer.
    – DavidPostill
    Nov 6, 2014 at 18:55

1 Answer 1

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No, it is not possible. Bandwidth and latency are not directly related. Traceroute simply reports the path selected, and latency.

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  • Bandwidth and latency are connected. If the bandwidth is saturated then congestion occurs and latency is increased. However, if the bandwidth of a circuit is not at its max, the latency will not decrease. Bandwidth can always be increased but latency cannot be decreased.
    – DavidPostill
    Nov 6, 2014 at 18:59
  • Sure they may be connected in effect, but they are not directly connected in any way useful for calculating total bandwidth of a link.
    – Zoredache
    Nov 6, 2014 at 19:01
  • Maybe this will help you understand my confusion, but according to this article by using round trip time we can calculate the Maximum bandwidth between two points. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_network_throughput
    – ealiaj
    Nov 6, 2014 at 19:27
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    That calculation only gives you the maximum possible bandwidth for tcp/ip communication, assuming that receive window size and round-trip times are the only limits. It depends on the fact that once you've sent Rwin bytes you can't send any more until some of those have been ACKd to you, and the ACK can't come back any faster than the r-t time. But there are many other possible limits. So this is really pretty useless for calculating your actual usable bandwidth. Nov 6, 2014 at 19:41

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