Patent ID: 8441930

Claim:
A system comprising: a communication path for communicating information including packets, a bandwidth estimator to provide an estimate of an amount of available bandwidth associated with the communication path based in part on an assessment of payload packet parameters of the packets communicated over the communication path, the bandwidth estimator operable to: determine a first packet gap comprising a transmitted packet gap measured as a time difference between a pair of transmitted packets at a time instance; determine a second packet gap comprising a received packet gap measured as a time difference between a pair of received packets at the time instance; determine a path capacity estimate based in part on a packet length divided by the difference of the received packet gap and the transmitted packet gap for packets that do not experience a defined amount of congestion; and, use the path capacity estimate in part to determine the estimate of the amount of available bandwidth based in part on the packets that do experience the defined amount of congestion; and, memory to store the estimate of the amount of available bandwidth.