is there a single-end available bandwidth measurement tool

Question

i am doing my graduation thesis,currently i need a tool that is capable of measuring the
available bandwidth between client and servers.i have googled that, the link
http://www.icir.org/models/tools.html has many tools to do that,however,they all seem to
have to deploy the program on both of the two ends,i.e,the sender and the receiver.

The problem is that i wanna measure ,for instance, the available bandwidth between my machine and one of the servers of Google, there is no way i can ssh to it and deploy the program(can they permit me to do that ??). So i kinda need a tool that runs on my own end and measure the bandwidth if the other end address is given,like

measurement_tool hostname_or_ipaddr_of_the_other_end

thanks in advance !

Answer 1

You send all traffic with a probability of loss... The best way to gather loss and thus throughput statistics is to instrument both ends of a connection. If you google "passive bandwidth measurement" you will see some reasearch techniques, but production usage relies on two sided data.

Answer 2

Use a cloud service to rent a server for a day and test at will!
Amazon for example offers 1 year free of charge for a "micro-instance" server, that's a good start.
I personally use 'iperf'.