Patent ID: 8503320

Claim:
A method of determining end-to-end available bandwidth of a path in a packet-switched communication network, said method comprising the steps of: injecting probe traffic packets into the network utilizing a probe chirp comprising a plurality of probe traffic packets, wherein at least some of the probe traffic packets are sent at different probing rates, u; sampling by a receiver, time separation of the probe traffic packets to generate time-separation samples; calculating relative inter-packet separation strain, ε, samples of the probe traffic packets in the probe chirp utilizing the time-separation samples at different probing rates; utilizing an Expectation-Maximization, EM, algorithm to identify useful strain ε samples and to estimate parameters of a line l 2 representing a direct linear relationship between the probing rate and the inter-packet separation strain ε at probing rates greater than a break point; and calculating the available bandwidth of the network path in real time based on the estimated parameters of the line 1 2 .