Patent ID: 7376731

Claim:
A system for providing statistics gathering within a multimedia packet network, comprising: At least one network processor configured to convert received multimedia packets into multiple length cells by adding a header to said received multimedia packet, wherein said header comprises a user defined field and a flow identification field; a traffic manager configured to measure and enforce multimedia flow rates, further configured to examine a copy field contained within the user defined field of the received multimedia packets to determine whether to copy the received multimedia packets to the at least one network processor; a host processor configured to perform multimedia flow quality measurement services on a per flow basis, wherein said multimedia flow quality measurement services comprise maintaining current statistics for multimedia flows within said network processor including aggregate and minimum/maximum statistics for said multimedia flow; and at least one field programmable gate array (FPGA) configured to copy a received multimedia packet or a portion of said received multimedia packet, and to utilize said copy of said received multimedia packet, or said copy of said portion of said received multimedia packet, to perform said statistics gathering via use of a series of calculation engines.