Patent ID: 8233402

Claim:
A method for characterizing a packet data network comprising a source node, a plurality of receiver nodes, and a plurality of paths, wherein each path in the plurality of paths connects the source node with one of the plurality of receiver nodes and wherein each of the paths comprises a plurality of links, the method comprising: recording at each of the plurality of receiver nodes arrivals of a plurality of multicast probe messages transmitted from the source node; and, calculating a probability that a length of a pass-run or a length of a loss-run exceeds a specific value for each link in the plurality of links for each path in the plurality of paths by inference from the recorded arrivals; wherein: none of the plurality of receiver nodes transmits a message to the source node in response to the arrivals of the plurality of multicast probe messages; and none of the plurality of receiver nodes transmits a message to any other of the plurality of receiver nodes in response to the arrivals of the plurality of multicast probe messages.