Patent ID: 7782794

Claim:
A method of measuring bandwidth of a network connection, the method comprising: establishing the network connection between a sending terminal and a receiving terminal; inserting a flag into a packet header for at least one packet, wherein the flag is to indicate to the receiving terminal that a bandwidth measurement is in progress, wherein the at least one packet includes a payload; determining if a time interval since a previous packet was transmitted is less than a threshold, based on the time interval being less than the threshold setting the flag in the packets header of the at least one packet to true; transmitting to the receiving terminal the at least one packet; storing the arrival time of the at least one packet; storing the packet header, for each packet with the flag set to true; summing arrival times of the at least one packet and the payload for the at least one packet; and calculating the bandwidth measurement of the network connection by dividing the summed payload value by the summed arrival times value; generating a bandwidth report.