Patent ID: 7133368

Claim:
A method of probing quality of service parameters in a peer-to-peer network between at least a first peer and a second peer, comprising the steps of: generating by the first peer a first and a second probing packet, each probing packet including a first timestamp; sending the first probing packet and the second probing packet to the second peer, the first timestamp of each probing packet indicating a time at which that probing packet is sent; receiving from the second peer a first acknowledgement packet and a second acknowledgement packet corresponding to the first probing packet and the second probing packet, each of said acknowledgement packets including the first timestamp of the probing packet to which the acknowledgement packet corresponds, a second timestamp indicating a time at which the correspanding probing packet arrived at the second peer, and a third timestamp indicating a time at which the acknowledgement packet was sent by the second peer; and calculating quality of service parameters for the network as a function of the first timestamp, the second timestamp, and the third timestamp of both the first acknowledgement packet and the second acknowledgement packet; wherein the step of generating the first probing packet and the second probing packet comprises the steps of generating the first probing packet of a first size, generating the second probing packet of a second size, and wherein the first size and the second size are equal; wherein the step of calculating quality of service parameters for the network comprises the step of calculating bottleneck bandwidth for a first path from the first peer to the second peer as a function of the first size divided by the difference between the second timestamp of the first acknowledgement packet and the second timestamp of the second acknowledgement packet; and wherein the steps of generating, sending, receiving, and calculating bottleneck bandwidth are repeated approximately 20 times, further comprising the step of filtering out pairs of acknowledgement packets that are interlaced with other packets.