In this paper we present three theoretically grounded methods: prediction, reconstruction and interpolation, for measuring cross traffic on the bottleneck link of an end-toend path. The objective is to infer cross traffic as accurately as possible, while not injecting a significant amount of probe packets into the network. In the prediction-based method, we take advantage of the LRD characteristic of the cross traffic to predict the future traffic based on the recent information obtained by

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... e packets. In the reconstruction method, we rebuild the entire cross traffic process with the information obtained by probe packets. In the interpolation method, we periodically send closely-spaced probe packet pairs to sample cross traffic of the bottleneck link, and infer cross traffic between two sampling points using interpolation. The simulation study indicates that (i) the prediction-based and reconstruction methods can give good mean measurement of cross traffic, while the interpolation method usually captures the instantaneous value of cross traffic better; and (ii) all three methods are adaptive to the dynamic change of cross traffic and are quite robust in the presence of multiple bottleneck links on an end-to-end path. 0-7803-7753-2/03/$17.00 (C)