Patent ID: 6928473

Claim:
A method for calculating the jitter of a packet flow sent by a program on a sending computer over a network to a receiving computer, comprising: accessing data collected on the sending computer, said data comprising identifiers of a plurality of packets sent by the program along with timestamps representing the times of transmission of the sent packets; accessing data collected on the receiving computer, said data comprising identifiers of a plurality of packets received from the network along with timestamps representing the times of reception of the received packets; associating, through the use of the sent and received packet identifiers, at least some of the sent packets with received packets by comparing a field uniquely identifying the packet flow in the sent and received packet identifiers and comparing an IP ID assigned to the packet in the sent and received packet identifiers; and calculating jitter as the variation in the differences between the reception and transmission timestamps of associated packets, wherein associating at least some of the sent packets with received packets comprises using the received packet identifiers to reorder the data collected on the receiving computer into the order in which the received packets were sent, wherein reordering comprises comparing a rollover component of the received packet identifiers, and wherein reordering further comprises imposing a window on the range of possible values of the rollover component that is smaller than the range of possible values of the rollover component of the received packet identifiers and reordering only the data the values of whose rollover component are within the window.