Patent ID: 8705381

Claim:
A method comprising: in response to receiving a request to establish a connection with a remote destination device over an Internet Protocol (IP) network, wherein receiving the request includes receiving input from a client device attempting to establish a VOIP (Voice Over IP) call connection with the remote destination device: obtaining multiple service code values, each of the service code values being a Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP) value and each of the service code values specifying a different logical network topology of the IP network, wherein obtaining the multiple service code values includes communicating with a call manager that provides the multiple service code values, and wherein each of which service code values specifies the different logical network topology on which to transmit the multiple messages, encoding each of multiple messages to include a unique service code value of the multiple service code values, initiating transmission of the multiple messages over the different logical network topologies of the IP network as specified by the respective messages' unique service code values to learn a preferred logical network topology of the IP network for establishing the connection with the remote destination device, and aborting an attempt to establish the connection with the remote destination device if a respective latency associated with the multiple messages is greater than a threshold value.