Patent ID: 6996626

Claim:
A voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) application comprising: a jitter buffer for receiving incoming VOID packets from an Internet, the incoming VOID packets containing compressed audio data from a remote VoIP application; an audio application, receiving the compressed audio data from the incoming VOID packets, for de-compressing the compressed audio data for playback to a user, and for capturing local audio data from the user; a packetizer, receiving the local audio data from the audio application, for compressing the local audio data and encapsulating the local audio data as well as data used to provide or derive an audio duration of the encapsulated data, into outgoing VoIP packets for transmission over the Internet to the remote VOID application; an estimator, receiving a reception time for a current VOID packet that indicates when the current VOID packet was received by the jitter buffer and the jitter buffer, for generating a bandwidth estimate for an incoming path through the Internet taken by the incoming VoIP packets; and a comparator, in the estimator, for comparing an arrival difference of the reception time and the prior reception time to the audio duration that indicates a duration of playback to the user of the compressed audio data encapsulated by the current VoIP packet; wherein the estimator decreases the bandwidth estimate when the comparator determines that the arrival difference exceeds the audio duration but increases the bandwidth estimate when the comparator determines that the arrival difference is below the audio duration; wherein the packetizer receives the bandwidth estimate from the estimator, the packetizer sending the bandwidth estimate to the remote VoIP application, whereby incoming bandwidth is estimated by comparison of the arrival difference to the audio duration.