Patent ID: 7720959

Claim:
A method for characterizing a quality of a network path, including a first segment and a second segment, the method comprising: modeling, by at least one network device, negative linear exponential equations for deriving first and second metrics, wherein modeling one of the negative linear exponential equations comprises determining a first parameter of the negative exponential equation corresponding to underestimating a quality characterization, determining a second parameter of the negative exponential equation corresponding to overestimating the corresponding quality characterization, and determining a third parameter from an average of the first and second parameters; wherein the first and second metrics are at least in part quality characterizations of a same plurality of one or more network applications; accessing the first metric and the second metric, the quality characterization characterizes a quality of the same plurality of one or more network applications running at one or more segment end-points, the first metric and the second metric are at least partly a function of a same plurality of one or more elementary network parameters, the plurality of one or more network parameters include one or more of delay, jitter, loss, currently available bandwidth, and intrinsic bandwidth, the first metric is at least partly the function of the same plurality of network parameters of the first segment, the one or more segment end points include one or more endpoints of the first segment, the second metric is at least partly the function of the same plurality of network parameters of the second segment, and the one or more segment end points include one or more endpoints of the second segment; and adding the first metric and the second metric to generate a third metric, wherein the third metric is at least partly the function of the same plurality of one or more network parameters of the network path, the one or more segment end points include one or more endpoints of the network path, and the third metric is a quality characterization of the same plurality of one or more applications.