Patent ID: 8248942

Claim:
A method comprising: from a device that is a source or destination of a real-time transport protocol (RTP) packet flow, transmitting a monitor request message to one or more other devices along a path of the RTP packet flow that requests the one or more devices to monitor the RTP packet flow and to gather information about the RTP packet flow associated with a plurality of network locations along the path of the RTP packet flow, wherein the monitor request message comprises an identifier that indicates the RTP packet flow to be monitored and an indicator that identifies recipient devices along the path of the RTP packet flow to perform monitoring of the RTP packet flow; receiving at the device that is the source or destination of the RTP packet flow one or more monitoring reports generated by and sent from the one or more other devices that receive the monitor request message along the path of the RTP packet flow; and determining from the gathered information a particular one of the network locations along the path of the RTP packet flow that corresponds to a network fault causing degraded performance of the RTP packet flow.