Patent ID: 9729452
Date: 2017-08-08
CPC Classifications: H04L

Claim:
1. An adaptive communication controller for providing wide area network (WAN) performance and utilization measurements to another network node over multiple parallel communication paths across disparate asymmetric networks which vary in behavior frequently over time, the adaptive communication controller comprising: an egress processor module that receives a first set of communication path quality reports and data in tagged packets from a peer node and generates accurate arrival times, send times, sequence numbers and unutilized byte counts for the tagged packets received from the peer node; a control module that generates a second set of communication path quality reports describing performance of the multiple parallel communication paths based on the first set of communication path quality reports and data received from the peer node and generates heartbeat packets for transmission on the multiple parallel communication paths if no other tagged packet has been received in a predetermined period of time to ensure performance is continually monitored; and an ingress processor module that transmits packets including the second set of communication path quality reports in tagged quality report packets and heartbeat packets to the peer node, wherein each transmitted quality report packet is tagged with a send time, sequence number, and unutilized byte count and each transmitted heartbeat packet is tagged with a send time.