Patent ID: 7948910

Claim:
A system comprising: a plurality of routers interconnected by a packet-based network, at least one of the routers comprising: a network interface, the network interface operable to receive a plurality of packets, make a plurality of forwarding decisions, and transmit the packets according to the forwarding decisions; a table identifying two or more packet flows, each of the packet flows comprising a plurality of packets; a monitoring application, the monitoring application configured, for each of the packet flows during each of a plurality of successive monitoring periods following an initial monitoring period, to inspect one or more transport headers of the packets, compile a quantity metric, and determine one or more quality metrics, the quality metrics for a current monitoring period determined according to a previous difference between the quantity metric and a constant, the constant defined by the amount of packets expected to be consumed by a media presentation application during a monitoring period, for a previous monitoring period and a current difference between the quantity metric and the constant for a current monitoring period; and a memory for storing the quality metrics.