Patent ID: 7251246

Claim:
At a media server disposed between a source and a destination in a packet-based communications system, a method of generating a stream of output media packets for the destination from a stream of input media packets received from the source, each input media packet containing sequence information identifying the relative location of the input packet in a stream of packets transmitted by the source, the input media packets exhibiting (1) mis-ordering with respect to the order of transmission by the source, and (2) inter-packet timing jitter having a magnitude of at least one nominal inter-packet interval, the method comprising: upon receiving input media packets including out-of-sequence and in-sequence input media packets, temporarily storing only the out-of-sequence input media packets in a buffer to defer processing of the out-of-sequence input media packets; upon receiving said in-sequence input media packets, processing each in-sequence input media packet substantially immediately and forward to the destination in order; and accessing from the buffer and processing substantially immediately those out-of-sequence input media packets whose processing was previously deferred when processing is in-sequence, thereby creating the corresponding output media packets, each output media packet being forwarded to the destination substantially immediately after being created.