Patent ID: 8767746

Claim:
A wireless system having bandwidth estimation components that classify communication sessions, the wireless system comprises: a plurality of wireless of devices that have communication sessions with packet traffic; and the bandwidth estimation component monitors packet traffic for each communication session and classifies the communication sessions as elastic or inelastic, wherein a communication session is classified as elastic when the rate of transmission grows during the communication session to exhaust the allocated bandwidth and a communication session is inelastic when the rate of transmission fails to grow during the communication session to exhaust the allocated bandwidth such that the bandwidth estimation component determines that the communication session is elastic or inelastic based on an exponentially averaged rho value ( ρ ), wherein the bandwidth estimation component evaluates the exponentially averaged rho value ( ρ i (t) ) for time slot t based on a rho value ρ i (t) at time slot t and an exponentially averaged rho value ρ i (t−1) at time t−1.