NAME

bwping and bwping6 are tools to measure bandwidth and response times between two hosts using Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request/echo reply mechanism.

SYNOPSIS

bwping [ -4 | -6 ] [ -B bind_addr ] [ -I ident ] [ -T tos(v4) | traf_class(v6) ] [ -r reporting_period ] [ -u buf_size ] -b kbps -s pkt_size -v volume target

bwping6 [ -4 | -6 ] [ -B bind_addr ] [ -I ident ] [ -T tos(v4) | traf_class(v6) ] [ -r reporting_period ] [ -u buf_size ] -b kbps -s pkt_size -v volume target

OPTIONS

-4: Forces IPv4 mode. Default mode of operation is IPv4 for bwping and IPv6 for bwping6 otherwise.
-6: Forces IPv6 mode. Default mode of operation is IPv4 for bwping and IPv6 for bwping6 otherwise.
-B bind_addr: Sets the source address of outgoing ip packets. By default the address of the outgoing interface will be used.
-I ident: Sets the Identifier value of outgoing ICMP Echo Request packets. If zero, the value of the lower 16 bits of the process ID will be used (default).
-T tos(v4) | traf_class(v6): Sets the TOS (in IPv4 mode) or Traffic Class (in IPv6 mode) value of outgoing ip packets. Default value is zero.
-r reporting_period: Sets the interval time in seconds between periodic bandwidth, RTT, and loss reports. If zero, there will be no periodic reports (default).
-u buf_size: Sets the size of the socket send/receive buffer in bytes. If zero (default), the system default will be used. Tune this parameter if the speed measurement results are unexpectedly low or packet loss occurs.
-b kbps: Sets the transfer speed in kilobits per second.
-s pkt_size: Sets the size of ICMP packet (excluding IPv4/IPv6 header) in bytes.
-v volume: Sets the volume to transfer in bytes.

AUTHORS

Oleg Derevenetz <oleg.derevenetz@gmail.com>

BUGS

None known.

NOTES

These tools use raw sockets to deal with ICMP messages, so they may require root privileges or extended capabilities (such as CAP_NET_RAW on Linux) to run. They can also be run as setuid root.

Although bwping and bwping6 does not require any special software on the remote host (only the ability to respond on ICMP echo request messages), there are some special requirements to network infrastructure, local and remote host performance:

1. There should be no ICMP echo request/reply filtering on the network. This includes QoS mechanisms (which often affects ICMP) at any point in the testing path;

2. Local host should have enough CPU resources to send ICMP echo request messages with given rate, and remote host should quickly respond on these messages and should have no ICMP bandwidth limiting turned on.

3. Each bwping and bwping6 process should use its own ICMP Echo Request Identifier value to reliably distinguish between ICMP Echo Reply packets destined for each of these processes.