The paper titeled "Bandwidth estimation: metrics, measurement techniques, and tools" (R Prasad, C Dovrolis, M Murray, K Claffy - Network, IEEE, 2003) is divided in three main chapters. First, it defines the three following metrics:
- Capacity: the maximum possible IP layer transfer rate.
- Available bandwidth: the unused, or spare, capacity of a link during a certain time period.
- Bulk Transfer Capacity (BTC): the maximum throuhput obtainable by a single TCP connection (depends on many factor like rtt, window size, TCP implementation).