Patent ID: 8259570

Claim:
A method of controlling transmission of packets from a transmitter to a receiver via a channel which employs packet queuing when overloaded, the method comprising: transmitting packets in a packet stream of ongoing traffic, each packet containing data and indicating a packet size based on data in the packet; determining a transmission time for each packet, based on a transmission clock; determining a reception time of each packet, based on a reception clock; supplying to an estimation function successive sets of observations including in each set transmission time, reception time and packet size; said estimate function arranged to provide from the ongoing traffic an estimate of bandwidth for the channel by employing a queuing model for the channel, the estimate function using the relationship between an estimate of the bandwidth, an estimate of the amount of data in a channel packet queue, packet size and the delay between transmitting successive packets in the packet stream; and using the estimated bandwidth to control transmission of packets.